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.

Errors in axiomatic construction

 Charlie has this tweet, which kicks off a thread that talks about technology in a context of atrocity but which settles into an axiomatic "Nazis are the problem".

That's a mistake.

Nazis are certainly one problem (and an immediate problem), but if you poke at it, fascism generally is a manifestation of a much more general problem, and that turns out to be a manifestation of the false axiom.

Fascism -- the several fascisms, white supremacy, American exceptionalism, whatever you call the "this is all ours" structures in Australia and Canada, etc. -- is a set of rationalizations to the effect that what you want, you should have, irrespective of what it is or how it got that way so long as those things are independent of another member of the in-group. ("In group" isn't stable; populism is a protest at being excluded from the in-group.)

That in turn rests on the idea that wealth reduces your insecurity.

It doesn't, it's the problem.  There's a very long historical pattern of using wealth to create armies and then using the armies to guarantee markets -- to force people to buy from you, which has higher rates of return than any possible mechanism of taxation because taxes have to come out of surplus if you are going to avoid breaking the economy -- followed by formalization into empire followed by collapse.  Empires always collapse.  It's inherent in the form of organization.  The collapse is generally protracted and severe.

(What wealth does do is increase your status, and being band-forming primates, we all have this wetware bug which equates status and security.  You'd think an awareness of kings in antiquity needing food tasters would start to put a dent in this, but it doesn't.  You'd think an awareness that the empire is not helping you if you're not a member of the elite would stick better, too, but it doesn't, either.)

Wealth -- the idea that you should be able to have, and keep, as much as you can obtain by any means -- also acts to increase the general insecurity by simple feedback; it's going to act to reduce your agency because structurally, it's trying to guarantee returns and equally structurally, those returns are not abstractions; they reduce to your effort and thus time and thus lifespan.  "Productivity" is a term of art for someone else being able to get more return per unit of time of your lifespan.

Any effective reduction in insecurity must rest on things which actually reduce insecurity generally.  (Which seems ridiculous as a thing which needs saying, but here we are.)  That in turn means you'd want a general measure of agency to be seen to not decrease (and to be evenly distributed over the population); it would also mean effective collective solutions.  Both of those imply that really sharp limits on relative prosperity are required, and that wealth in the "keep whatever I obtain" sense cannot be permitted.

It's insecurity management all the way down

 Insecurity doesn't make sense.  It's part of the reality map, the thing your brain constructs, not reality.

That means it's constructed directly bounded by (personal!) brain-constraints and only indirectly by reality.  (Which can take a long time to show up; consider society as ablative armour for the reality map. Consider the construction of power as how much of society is ablative armour for your personal reality map. (If you're Mr. Hohenzollern, the answer is "all of it".))

This makes how you feel about it inherently dangerous for any value of "it".  Your feelings might be valid, you feelings might be necessary, they are certainly yours, but they're also inherently dangerous.  Feelings produce certainty; they don't produce correctness.  There's an argument that, being your feelings, the consequences mostly happen to you, so this is a problem with its own built-in correcting feedback, but that argument's highly dubious at personal scales and it cannot be advanced at larger scales. (The internet is an extelligence; "my ignorance is infinite but google knows everything". It's also exo-feelings and exo-reality; the inevitable collective id-amplifier effect is not something from which individuals can plausibly defend themselves.)

Society is about insecurity management; "am I going to starve to death?", "will someone help me if I'm in trouble?", "how much custom and habit do we have for what kind of ganging up on problems?" and so on.

This is not amorphous; society is a bunch of sociotechnical assemblages, the active customs and habits for solving problems.  These do three things; most importantly, they decide which problems get solved at all.  Secondly, they constrain how you can solve a problem.  Thirdly, they express insecurity as logistical capability; insecurity becomes investment if you can connect the insecurity to something people believe will reduce that insecurity.

Simple example; owning your own home reduces your insecurity. (This is an axiom, rather than a fact.)  There's an awful lot of exceedingly similar residential construction because the machine, the socio-technical assemblage, consumes insecurity and delivers "a house", but it does it to benefit someone who neither lives in the house nor lives where the houses are built.

Less simple example; specifying the basis of insecurity is power.  Creating insecurity is more power.  People flail trying to explain this because there's no direct material connection; the complaint is an amorphous and statistical one about population statistics and how reality maps get constructed.

This has (at least) three consequences.

Firstly, if you have enough agency, you can decide to move the population statistics. There's been a lengthy right-wing project to this purpose, and it has obviously caused change in how people construct their insecurity for both material and axiomatic reasons.

Tabloid media and advertising are obvious examples; so is the way people recognize that they have a narrow range of choices if they want to keep on eating.  It's a control mechanism to embed people in a socio-technical assemblage where the only way they can survive is to surrender their entire cashflow.  This allows the appearance of agency; it doesn't have to be called slavery.  (It does diffuse the take across multiple owners, and you can can see this causing strain in the oligarchical class with the move to reinvent the company town.)

Secondly, if your personal construction of security relies on being obeyed because you said so—if you think you have socially constructed authority—reference to facts increases your insecurity.  Your core need for a feeling of security causes you to prefer to act to eradicate facts.

Thirdly, facts are a complex habit that addresses material security.  Facts don't come with an automatic mechanism connecting the material to the reality map, and this is difficult because the reality map works on narrative and facts are inherently statistical, distributed—it's not about what's in your head—and mutable as the best consensus understanding moves with the increase of knowledge.

In general, you have to be taught how to incorporate facts into your reality map construction; it's not easy, it takes practice, and it takes access to process models for how you do it with a particular category of facts.

So when we see people following any line of abject nonsense offered to them to avoid getting vaccinated, when people insist that there's no possible way their fossil carbon extraction socio-technical assemblage deserves to be shut down, or when people insist their personal construction of gender should control everyone else everywhere, the problem is not in the apprehension of facts.  The problem is that this happens because this course of action reduces their insecurity—they construct reality this way, and they do it this way because it's the easiest way to do it.

No amount of communicating facts will alter any of this.  (It's not just livelihood, it's self.  People do not want to increase their understanding in a way that alters their imagination of self.)

Teaching people how to incorporate facts into their reality map can have an affect on this.  It's a lot of work, and it supposes the people involved want to learn.  (One issue with educational funding involves whether or not your socio-technical assemblage has a general and effective mechanism for teaching this stuff.)

It's also really slow, generationally slow, and without any direct means of political articulation.

If you want effective, that's where the civil power comes in; public decisions are, well, public, and taken on facts.  The civil power acts to set bounds on conduct and enforces them with enough force to get people to do the work of altering their reality map to conform to the boundary.

A whole lot of people would go AIEE! at that; their reality map includes the idea that there's no licit exercise of power.  The folks with the authoritarian construction of insecurity management—reality is what I say it is, you are what I say you are, I can kill anything that upsets me to prove these things—aren't going to stop torturing trans kids to death until they're stopped.  There's a wodge of history that says the civil power—that idea that power is licit in proportion to the degree to which its exercise references no individual's insecurity—is the least expensive way to stop them.  Iterate for pandemic and endemic diseases, fossil carbon extraction driven climate collapse with attendant human extinction, and mammonism.

This is all the same problem; does an individual get to be much less insecure than the other members of society? (Of course I want to say materially insecure, but that's obviously not the actual problem, is it?)

If you want a functioning society, the answer is "no", and all that this implies.

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.

Making the pandemic political

 I've been seeing a lot of "why would?" remarks about attacks on health care workers.  (Mostly threats so far.)

The "culture war" isn't about culture; it's about where authority comes from.  If authority derives from facts, the consent of the governed, and the greatest good for the greatest number, a lot of powerful things go away. (Patriarchy.  Fixed hierarchical systems.  Fossil carbon extractive industries.)

How do you keep your authority -- the "it's true because I say so" authority of a fixed hierarchy -- in the presence of a pandemic and facts?  You don't change your mind; changing your mind runs you into the Iron Law of Bureaucracy (every organization acts to keep existing before it does anything else) and you stop being relevant to anything.  You come up with reasons to ignore the facts, and (since the pandemic is a fact, and the deaths are facts, and the insisting that it's not, it can't be, makes everything worse) you need something with a lot of emotional pull.  So you create increasingly outre stories about how the pandemic (or climate change, or the negative health consequences of air pollution, or...) isn't real.  And since you have to be relatively detached from reality -- to already have a considerable disdain for facts -- to start to believe the stories, you get a self-reinforcing spiral.  People commit their entire identities to falsifiable axioms.

Reality doesn't bend.  This creates a temptation to think "Surely people will see sense".

From the historical examples -- particularly cults predicting the end of the world -- no, people will not see sense.  Anything is emotionally cheaper than admitting your identity axioms are wrong.

The next step is to recognize that the construction of civil power inside a nation-state was invented to deal with this problem.  Which is why so much propaganda effort has gone into an effort to make people accept religious conviction as an excuse for flouting the law; if they can create that acceptance, they've broken the rule of law and the civil power.  It's pretty close to winning the fight, from the viewpoint of someone who wants to go back to control of women, cattle, and slaves as the core organizing principle of society.

This is one reason to be in favour of truly mandatory COVID vaccinations. (The other, stronger, reason is that it might work; a fully vaccinated population and some additional infection control gets us closer to extirpation.)

It's also a reason to recognize that there isn't a nice way forward.  There isn't a way to tactfully urge the people threatening nurses and doctors with death to reconsider their pandemic stance.  Some exercise of the civil power will be required.  It'll be better if that exercise addresses root causes; the lack of an upper bound on wealth is prominent among them.  The lack of a clear general awareness that a functioning society must be about bounds and not norms is another.

Lagging indicators

 Vaccine effectiveness is measured; you give the vaccine to a number of people, and you count how many of them get sick from the thing you vaccinated them against, and you compare that to the expected number of sick people without vaccination.

The ethics panel won't let you deliberately infect your test group to see who gets sick from exactly how much measured exposure.  You're stuck using random exposure, and that is affected by behaviour.

We've known almost from the beginning that COVID-19 is a dose-dependent disease; how sick you get is influenced by how much virus you were exposed to when you were infected.

People who are not sure if they got the vaccine or the placebo, and who are further not sure that the vaccine works, go right on being cautious.  Caution reduces both their chance of being exposed and their dose if they are exposed.  (They are, after all, the sort of pro-science public-spirited people who sign up for vaccine trials; they don't want to get sick and they're at least aware of the "how not to get sick" guidelines and are probably following a bunch of them.)

People who think they're now immune are less cautious.  They get exposed more often and to statistically larger doses.  They get sick more than the test group does; the measured vaccine effectiveness is observed to go down.

Sure as death, the vaccine effectiveness has been reduced; that's exactly what you expect selection to do when you've got a functional vaccine, a big population of variously infected and vaccinated people, and long illnesses which give the virus a sustained period of reproduction in which to mutate.  But we can't tell how much is selection, and how much is a change in behaviour, without doing experiments to which that ethics board would rightly object.

In terms of things you can change, vaccine effectiveness is a lagging indicator of behaviour.  The vaccine you received is more effective if you distance, mask, and avoid going inside anywhere but your home like the plague.  If you act like COVID-19 doesn't exist, the vaccine is less effective.

(The medical statisticians trying to pull apart how much is behaviour and how much is virus variation have an unenviable job.  We'll never know without significant error bars.  But for planning purposes, here at individual scale, vaccine effectiveness is a lagging indicator of behaviour.)

The Four COVID-19 Numbers

1. Worldwide infection count
2. Local RT
3. Population immunity
4. Local cases under treatment

Worldwide infection count is the number we want to be zero for a year.  Then there's a party. That's a ways off and it's a goal of policy and diplomacy.  Don't worry about that one particularly right now.

Local RT is the transmission rate; on average, for everyone who has it, how many people catch it?  You want this number as low as you can get it.  Errors in measurement and wanting to minimize the number of cases -- every case is a chance for a new, worse, mutation -- means you should do everything you can to keep this number low.  Mask mandates, enforced mandatory quarantines, aggressive track and trace, and barriers to inter-regional movement are all important.

Population immunity is the number of people who won't catch it.  There's a statistical relationship between RT, R0, and this number; the consensus of the knowledgeable had it around 85% for the pre-delta variants.  (delta makes this number higher.  And remember that we can never guarantee an individual won't catch it, just make it less likely.)  That's 85% of the total population, fully vaccinated.  This is not a number we can reach with current vaccines, so just vaccination is helpful, but not sufficient.  We're not going to get the worldwide (or even local) infection count to zero solely through vaccination.

Local cases under treatment is the "will the healthcare system collapse?" number.  (If it does, you expect an order of magnitude more dead.)  This is the number you only care about if those responsible have made an intolerable hash of policy responses to 2 and 3.  Focusing policy on this number is an indication of complete failure.  (Also long term system damage; medical personnel take a long time to train.)

If you live somewhere the local RT number doesn't get more public attention than population immunity, or where the local cases under treatment has to be a policy consideration, you can be confident that the policy response is poor and will stay poor.  Plan on the assumption that the only things reducing your infection risk are the decisions you make.

The Fours

 It was a Medieval through Early Modern into per-Great-War fashion to list virtues.

Virtues are a lot; the point of virtues is, somewhat, that they're rare.  You can't expect anyone to be virtuous all the time, and you can't expect everyone to be virtuous.

What you can reasonably expect are the fours -- forthrightness, forbearance, foresight, and fortitude.

People who aren't consistently and reliably demonstrating the fours in their conduct are not people who should have responsibility.  Which means don't subscribe to them as much as it means don't vote for them.  It means working on your forthrightness and not making excuses for them, too.

You'd think someone would have a grasp of Parliamentary procedure who wasn't evil

To Raj Saini, MP

Hello --

There's a lot of tactful suggestions being provided.  What I want to say is "Do you job."

Bill C-12 is not what it should be; it does not go far enough, it does not do enough, it does not treat the present emergency with the urgency and terror it deserves.  

(If you don't feel terror at the prospect of breaking agriculture, you need to stop and think about it.)

But bill C-12 is something, and it's a start, and it's an acknowledgement that we need to do something now, today, not tomorrow.

Get Bill C-12 passed.

If there isn't food to eat and water to drink and places to live, nothing else matters.  All of those things are at risk from climate change, inside the lifespans of today's middle-aged voters, never mind the young.

Get Bill C-12 passed, and then get to work on more; figuring out we're all going to eat once agriculture breaks, figuring out where we're going to live (the current housing stock is close to worthless without fossil carbon furnaces, all the drainage is wrong, etc.), and figuring out how the economy is going to work once -- hopefully by sooner than 2030 -- all fossil carbon extraction has stopped.

Do your job.

Pass Bill C-12.

Graydon Saunders

Culpability for genocide, necessary changes, and reparations

To the Honourable Raj Saini,

I am distressed at the ongoing public talk of a national day of mourning for the recently found indigenous kids whose mass grave is adjacent to a residential school near Kamloops. Those are not our deaths to mourn; those children were there to die as a matter of long-held and determined policy, one recognized for its genocidal intent as it was made and as it was enacted.  Calls for an official public show of settler grief are entirely too much like a murderer demanding to give the eulogy at their victim's funeral.

The appropriate response is not some show of distress; it is to end, by whatever sufficient and immediate means comes to hand, the long-standing genocidal policies which the government of Canada continues to maintain.

That would mean, as a beginning, several obvious immediate things:

That the government of Canada acknowledge its long term culpable guilt for having engaged in genocide in the matter of the residential schools in the process of dropping its appeal at the Human Rights Tribunal. (Not sole guilt; there is plenty enough guilt to go around, and some approximation of justice or at least cost needs must be visited upon the entirety of the guilty.)

That the government of Canada comprehensively dissolve and abolish the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, with the entirety of those now employed by that ministry leaving public service, never to return while their lives last.  It is clearly not possible for this department to depart from its genocidal origins, and structural reform having been found obviously and demonstrably impossible, it must be abolished.

That the government of Canada immediately make it materially established that no settler interest possesses any unilateral rights to any portion of indigenous land, any more than some other level of government could properly unilaterally occupy Queen's Park or the National Assembly.  Whatever is required of Her Canadian Majesty's treasury and armoury to promptly establish this must be expended.  (This would include an expeditious change to whatever legislation as would be required to have the courts place indigenous concerns, environmental concerns, and questions of distributed harm universally and absolutely ahead of any questions of notional economic benefit in the form of specific profits.  It's easy to profit if you're permitted to loot, yet the general cost, borne by all of us, greatly exceeds any profit so obtained.  Environmental looting is a practice we should all do well to end.)

That the government of Canada, while negotiations to establish the amounts and schedules of necessary reparations to the surviving indigenous peoples are ongoing, provide per-annum funds in the amount of one percent of the Canadian GDP to the indigenous peoples of Canada.  While it is clearly beyond the powers of the Government of Canada to provide for the living conditions of indigenous peoples however the law might oblige them, it seems plausible that many of these difficulties can be addressed directly by those indigenous peoples should such funds become available.  (Nor does it seem to me that a one percent land-rent is especially much, considering.)



This coming century shall be a grim time, no matter what we do to begin to redress our folly now.  It is still better to stop doing what we ought not to have done than to continue.

I hope and expect you will find it in yourself to be a voice toward doing what is needful.

Sincerely,

Graydon Saunders

[address redacted]

Constructions of security

 The overt rise of private police has any number of people making distressed noises.

There's three practical ways to manage insecurity in general.  ("Attain enlightenment" is reported to be effective, but it's not practical.)  You can have control; you can believe that events are predictable; or you can trust that you're included in a collective system to produce security.

Nobody believes they're in the collective system; pick at least one of obviously unjust, indifferent, ineffective, overtly oppressive, unaccountable, and obviously owned.  Whoever the system is for, it's not you.

Control doesn't work; it's a popular approach, you can decide you know what's really going on or you can decide to believe you have enough money (you don't) or something, but there's one of you and a whole lot more in the way of just other people.  Control is not an option.

Predictability, well.  The reliable predictions are things like "the weather will get worse for at least the next century" and "there will be another plague".

The fallback, in a mammonite culture, is money; if I have enough money, I can get what I want,  and often "I want" is to remove the fear of uncertainty.  The fix for this is simple -- income and asset caps; if you can do that, it's not a mammonite culture -- but then you have to do something about membership in a collective something able to produce security.  Which would require a generally accepted construction of justice.  Which in turn requires replacing the extant power structure with something more just and better able to win systemic fights.

Which the people successful in the current system actively don't want.  So you get the effort to sell the illusion of security via a means unable to actually produce any such thing.

Narrative disjunction

After about a hundred and fifty years of effort, it's about slunk into general political understanding and widespread thought that you can't have a just patriarchy; that the idea of enacting a patriarchy is itself unjust.

Not a universal awareness; not controlling, in any political sense.  But actually meaningfully politically there.

Climate, though, climate hasn't had -- and hasn't got! -- a century and a half.  About the best you can get are scattered voice saying "everything has to change", meaning that human institutions must be altered to prevent disaster.

That's wrong; it is in fact not the case that everything must change; it's hard to find a human institution that even pretends to agree that it needs to change, and everything is discussed in terms of future choices and options, rather than pressing present necessity.  What we've got is a situation where change has come to everything.  There will be more; we do not know with confidence how much, only more than; the floor is vaguely predictable, but not the ceiling.

(The folks pushing adaptation are generally a mix of "don't inconvenience me", "this isn't important", and refusing to think about the scale of the problem.  They're still imagining something like our present industrial society.)

Agriculture flatly requires a combination of sufficient soil, sufficiently predictable rainfall, and sufficiently predictable weather in general.  That's going.  Even the IPCC  can't imagine it continuing to exist past 2050. It'll come back, but it'll come back on a time scale of millenia, when people need to eat every day.

The entirety of our industrial capacity rests on fossil carbon; adhesives, insulators, seals, coatings, and lubricants are involved in everything.  All of those derive from fossil carbon sources.[1]  Air-source carbon can in principle be substituted, but to a first approximation no one is doing it.

The entirety of our financial system rests on fossil carbon; money gets created through making loans.  Oil exploration loans, housing loans, car loans, and consumer credit between them focus the entirely system rigidly on a fossil carbon status quo.  Nothing is going to change without fixing this part of the problem, and the minimum fix for it is "new economy, new politics".

Which in turns means a new construction of social status -- taking people who have the greatest social standing, agency, and power, and reducing them to a lesser state -- and that, historically, is where heaps of skulls come from, because being really rich causes brain damage; you stop being able to think "you know, I don't need to be the richest; I could just be quite comfortable and busy and well-liked".  You tend to insist that nothing is allowed to change if it affects you.

Which, well, that appears to be about where we all are, in the narrative.

Reality is indifferent to narrative.  Reality is not something with which we can negotiate.  Reality does not contain much in the way of excess capacity.

Everything is changing.  The Last Normal Year is in the past somewhere.  The future is hungry.

[1] I have a can of hyper-organic hemp-oil wood finish.  The coating lining the can is from a fossil carbon source; likely the paint in the label is, too.  Never mind the lubricants in the machine that made the can, the insulators on the electrical conductors, seals in the hydraulics, etc.

More than sufficient incompetence

 Approximately a thousand years ago, the Globe and Mail articles on Doug Ford's alleged drug dealing produced a "that's not much of a surprise" response.  Today I find myself feeling excessively slow, because those articles reached a conclusion that if Doug had had something to do with selling hash, it sure looked like he'd been at least a couple levels up as a distributor, rather than your local weed man.  (It also carefully didn't say anything much about whether this was a business Doug had ever actually left.)

Today, it's hard to avoid a notion that whether or not Doug left that business is the wrong sort of question; is there someone to whom Doug retains obligations from those days?  (I am embarrassed by how long it took me to think of this question.) Hard to think there wouldn't be; Doug got somewhere, but it wasn't the top.  And real organized crime is hardly distinguishable from some regular lines of business until you get into precise details of title and so on.  They're getting a cut.  Why they're getting a cut isn't something you expect to know. Completely plausible that Doug straight up owed somebody getting rid of paid sick leave and it's not on the table out of political conviction -- Doug's only reliable conviction is that people who don't do what he says are bad people -- but because Doug's boss says it's not allowed.

That has some long-term implications for Ontario politics.

The present implications are that the PC government is not merely incapable of taking effective public health measures, is not merely incapable of learning, is not merely collectively innumerate, and is not merely focused on trying to wring partisan advantage from a pandemic; it is not even that the definition of profit is completely disjoint from how many people get killed due to the regular function of your business.  It's that policy is being set on the instructions of the premier's boss, without any pretense of civil government, the consent of the governed, or that the government is responsible to the electorate.

It's a pure example of the oligarchical view that the function of government is to maintain a pool of helpless labour, ideally free labour, which is required to do precisely what it is told regardless of circumstances.  It's the attitude of a slaveholder who has outsourced labour management to the government, and who has very specific expectations about how nothing ever increases their costs because that would decrease their profits, and that horror of decreased profits clearly contravenes the divine mandate for the natural order.

Time to enact some structural change.

You'd think this was obvious

 So there's a policy petition; change the policy from pandemic mitigation (and the horrors we observe that strategy to produce) to extirpation.

I've signed it; I would urge you to consider doing the same.

Rₜ, R₀, and vaccination

There's a "nothing in real life is ever this simple" formula about what fraction of the population needs to be immune ("have a robust immune response"), before you can stop worrying about the spread of a disease:

If R₀ (or Rₜ) is 5 (in the vicinity for wild-type COVID-19), you need 80% of the population to have a robust immune response to keep the disease from spreading using herd immunity alone.

If R₀ is 10, which is not implausible for some of the observed COVID-19 variants, you need 90% of the population to have a robust immune response to keep the disease from spreading using herd immunity alone.

Knowledgeable people who are not doing the "nothing is ever this simple" version are saying things like "at least 85%" about the necessary vaccination level for herd immunity; the current vaccination rates, even in the US, aren't anywhere close to enough to keep the disease from spreading.

If 85% vaccination is required to get to herd immunity, we can't get there this year; at least twenty percent of the population is too young to be given any current COVID vaccine, even if absolutely every adult gets vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine.  Approvals for use as paediatric vaccines are being sought for all the COVID vaccines, but right now the age cutoff is 18.  Several of the vaccines can't get to 85% effectiveness, either; so far only the mRNA vaccines have effectiveness levels high enough that, in principle, vaccinating absolutely everybody would be sufficient to extirpate the disease.

We know, from several national examples of effective public health, that you don't need a vaccine to extirpate the disease; you can institute movement controls, food delivery, necessary "hold in place" payments so people can not work and not starve, enforced quarantines, and a robust track-and-trace system, and extirpate the disease that way.  It'd be really expensive to do that now, rather than in the beginning, but it could be done.  Effective public health measures are not being done as a matter of deliberate and conscious profits-before-people policy, targeting reopening rather than extirpating the disease.

The variants now spreading affect children and young people more seriously than the wild type.

We can expect, if we treat some level of vaccination -- any level of vaccination we can achieve this year -- as grounds to generally drop COVID restrictions,  that we will see the continued spread of the disease.  It will produce many more dead children compared to the wild type, and it will (given the Brazilian example) put vaccinated people into hospital, possibly in large enough numbers to overload the system.  (The system overload threshold is decreasing over time, as health care personnel are being expended by the strain.)

What the vaccines accomplish, even the "this won't stop spread" vaccines, is to greatly reduce your odds of harm if you should contract the disease.  You are much, much less likely to die or to require hospitalization.  This is useful and worthwhile; by all means get vaccinated.  Just remember that this is a personal-scale benefit, not a systemic solution.

The other thing the vaccines do, because they are not sterilizing vaccines, is increase the odds of worse variants developing in a given individual; more infectious variants arise when the virus spends a long time reproducing inside one host.  That is, the virus and the host's immune system stalemate, and the virus reproduces many more times than usual, increasing the odds of a mutation that increases virulence happening.  This is a big part of why you don't want people catching the disease in the first place and why the "just let it burn through the population and it's over" take is extremely dangerous.  The sixty percent vaccination rate that's guessed as the eventual full voluntary uptake is, as the sole public health measure, a recipe for worse COVID.

The policy that comes out of this ought to be:

1. vaccinate everybody as soon as possible, starting with the people in the groups most likely to catch the disease
2. adopt the full public health measures, including movement controls, enforced quarantine, and a required complete economic shutdown so people can stay home
3. an explicit requirement that reopening happens if and only if the disease is extirpated; no level is acceptable

because otherwise we're just going to keep going round and round in this merry dance.

(There's a political truism that things mostly go away on their own, if you just wait a bit.  That's not true of diseases, and it seems rather difficult for a lot of politicians to absorb that it's not true of diseases.)

The importance of selecting achievable objectives

Our World in Data will give you a graph; I think that link takes you to the current version of:

Oddly enough, Blogger can't cope with SVG, so pardon the grainy PNG. (Opening in a new tab may help; the original image is large, and might get better scaling that way.)

It's a log graph; those horizontal dashed lines are an order of magnitude apart.  We've got four groups; from the bottom, prompt extirpation, eventual extirpation, cost minimization with effective public health mechanisms, and cost minimizations without effective public health mechanisms.

I think it's an absolute no-brainer that trying for cost minimization was and is a mistake.  I think it's painfully obvious that the good people of Canada have no possibility of getting any approximation of good government -- in this context, definitionally one attempting to extirpate the disease, rather than trying to minimize the cost of the disease to select segments of society -- and we haven't got effective public health mechanisms with respect to the pandemic, because various provincial governments just flatly refuse to even consider funding them.

And now we're looking at an act of public optimism in Canada -- that delaying second doses of vaccines will provide effective long-term protection, because surely the first dose protective effect will have some sort of linear decay -- rather than, you know, doing what we  know works to extirpate the disease, because the rot runs deep and literally no one in a position of power is capable of picking an objective that's not measured in money.  The countries in the extirpation groups did it without a vaccine; a vaccine is extremely helpful, especially for health care workers, but you don't actually require one.

You do need a competent civil power; the official ideology looks completely irrelevant.  (Westminster democracy, ultra-capitalist constitutional republic, authoritarian communists, constitutional republic, constitutional republic, authoritarian communists, and the range of per-capita GDP is broad.)

Figuring out how to stop being a failed petrostate isn't going to be cheap.  Figuring out how to decarbonise and keep feeding everybody is going to be hard, never mind "not cheap".  COVID is pretty much easy mode compared to either of those, and what claims to be good government has entirely failed; it's failed so hard it shows no sign of noticing it's failed, or that success was an option.

It leaves me fearful and sad.  We're going to have to do so much better than this.

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.

A functioning system doesn't give you what you want

 It keeps you from getting what you don't want.

There's an aphorism about however many ways there might be to be alive, there are vastly more ways to be dead.  (Sometimes expressed as observing that to a first approximation, every species is extinct.)

Systems can handle the small number; the list of things (being subject to violence, privation, ignorance, and want) you wish the system to prevent.  Maintaining the core goal of civilisation -- that you die, on the odds, of something that isn't starvation or violence -- is simple enough to build a system to accomplish.

A system that guarantees you get what you want isn't simple enough to build.  A system that gets you what you want, or worse, the entirety of what you want, is required to dispose of the constraints that would require you not to oppress everyone else, since it's impossible to constrain it not to oppress them into the violence-privation-ignorance-and-want space and still give you whatever arbitrary thing you desire, too.  So you wind up committed to the oppression as soon as you expect direct, positive outcomes from your society.

(There's nothing wrong with wanting things, or trying to get them, but you have to stay in the "no causing violence, privation, or want" constraints of civilization when you do it.  Move outside that -- try to make society a guarantee and a surety of your specific desires -- and you're going wrong.)

We're suffering from a long period where policy has been to give the rich what they want.  It's distorted everything into increasing general suffering, privation, ignorance, and want in preference to finding a way to tell the rich no, you can't have that.

The simple-enough-to-work fix is "no rich people".  We know getting clever with feedback doesn't work; we're living in the failure of the mid-twentieth century attempts to do this with feedback. Time to do it with constraints.

Housing inappropriately located in market spaces

[some time ago now, a comment from Arborman effectively asked what's this approach to housing you're talking about? I hope this is something in the vicinity of a useful response.]

At present, the COVID-19 recession has many people faced with eviction.

Why?

Well, generally, because the public sphere has not acted to house them.  It hasn't done that because there's a construction of axiomatic justice which says, you must pay.

That in turn comes in with the triumph of wealth-concentration as the mechanism of organising society during the Carbon Binge; there were, before Great Harry suppressed the monasteries, alternate support mechanisms beyond your utility to existing wealth.  There were, before Puritans demonized hospitality and generosity, constructions of virtue around charity as an act. (as distinct from the present "and if they weren't bad, we wouldn't need to do this".)  There were, before the enclosures of the commons, villages as collective organizations to supply basic needs.  Today, there aren't; it's nigh-impossible to have any form of collective organisation that isn't a for-profit corporation.

(What we're seeing with the US evangelical movement is a sort of mammonite memetic colonisation of the practice of religion.  It's not a collective support mechanism in material terms, it's a ranched population of marks.)

If we're going to consider housing in a context of not being mammonites, we need to start with that axiom of justice; you must pay.

The simple reason for that axiom is that justice is presently constructed to guarantee wealth.  This is a conscious and deliberate process and explains much of how wealth has had a presumption of virtue attached to it.  (There aren't many working rationalisations for the inherent probity of keep the loot.  Much better to avoid that question somehow.)

The structural reason for that axiom of payment is that once you introduce payment, you get relative advantage. If you iterate, you wind up with a small number of winners and a very large number of losers; dumb luck will do that.  If you introduce relative advantage (often the dumb luck to be born with something that confers relative advantage), you get the same small number of different winners; different because you've introduced this bias.  Because the iterations are generally slow enough to notice, you get widespread and then consensus rationalisations for why the bias is good; people who have it are sure it is, and they have most of the agency.  (Plus people who don't have it still want it, so you get rationalisations about why it would be OK if they had it.)

Which is also how you get homeless people.

Which is a euphemism; "dying of exposure" is less euphemistic.  "Lost some fingers to frostbite, struggled, then died, because that facilitates the relative advantage of someone with more than they can ever possibly use" is starting to get toward factual.

It's a brutal, brutal system.  It's a brutal system even when people manage to remain housed at the cost of two-thirds of their income from working multiple unsafe jobs for low hourly pay.

So what would it look like if it wasn't brutal?  If the axiom was something like people have value, rather than keep the loot?

People need, not just a place to sleep without fear, but a place to securely keep their stuff; people need a privy, and a place to bathe, and a place they can store and prepare food.  It has to function all year round, in any weather.  It needs to be a space you can clean without heroic effort; it needs to be something you can alter and decorate.  (If you can't change it, it isn't yours, and if it's not yours you're definitionally insecure.)

So there's a whole lot of problems; how do you build that, in the century of angry weather? what do you make it out of, and how, so it isn't adding carbon load to the atmosphere? what heats it, what cools it, how do you ensure the heating the cooling and water and the sewage work even during external service interruptions? How do you make it quiet, and private, and have natural light, and not use up unreasonable ground area in what will need to be an increasingly dense urban landscape?  How do you ensure this thing you've built keeps working across generations, because you're not going to want to rebuild housing again for a long while; it's going to be expensive.  That's where Universal Design comes in, and should come in.

That's the general scale of housing problem; as a system, what kind of housing does society build?

As an individual, you have to ask mostly how do you pay for it? People need to move, it takes time to accumulate value, and the value in mortgages doesn't go to the house purchaser, so this isn't a question that has a sensible present answer.

I think the "pay for it" problems collapse into three general areas.

One is risk; two is durability, and three is mobility.

You manage risk collectively.  That shouldn't mean a single massive collective housing authority, but a large number of just-large-enough housing collectives with specialities and geographic particularity.  So you join one when you start being an adult; maybe you inherit a membership, maybe membership is passed to offspring of existing membership, maybe there's a joining lottery, maybe you just apply.  But in all cases, three things are true; you get a membership in some housing collective. All the memberships are of required to be exchangeable, so if you want to move your existing membership can be swapped for membership somewhere else (and the range of values for housing collectives is constrained to some fairly narrow range to permit this).  You can't lose your membership; it's not a transferable asset in the sense of something you can sell or lose in bankruptcy or not be able to pay for. (Which means there's going to have to be some public backstop when people get ill, hurt, lose their jobs, etc.)

Durability means a bunch of things; one of the things it means is you can't use an individual-scale market mechanism for this because most individuals know nothing about houses.  The current housing market is about materials for producing houses and house producers buying land, it has nothing to do with the people in the house.  So it cannot deliver value in the sense of habitability days per currency unit; the folks building houses want to keep doing that, if they can get the working life of a house under two generations that would be perfect.

We're going to need a new building code, new materials (and thus a lot of training AND some serious civil-power coercion to shift trades), and we're going to need a long-term, educated, skilled buyer.  Oh look, a housing collective again; something that expects to be immortal, is trying to minimize its long term spend, and has the ability to buy value.  (Which most individual house buyers aren't equipped to recognize, remember; you can't purchase what you can't identify.)

Mobility means people need to move; if you own a house today, moving is a problem because home ownership is only a good investment if you don't move.  This is not of general economic benefit; rearranging communities of practice is a net positive, and systemic barriers to the free movement of labour are a net negative.  Only one of those systemic barriers is produced by the effort to maximize cash extraction from housing, so we definitely have it, and we're going to have to abolish it.  Which might mean restructuring all the financial institutions sitting on mortgages as their primary capitalization.

But, anyway; housing does not belong in the domain of markets, nor of profit.  The question for housing is, "how many can we house, how well, for this much?" and that's a public-sphere question.  Which means some set of public institutions as necessary to accomplish the task.

Canada had a grip on COVID-19 before schools were opened

So Statistics Canada has this sadly laggy weekly excess deaths chart.  (The link is the real thing, which is somewhat dynamic and has all the data; below is a screen grab, taken 2021-01-09.)

Presuming their 2020-10-17 number isn't real -- they haven't got the provincial reporting yet -- it looks like there was a general grip on COVID-19 transmission until various provincial governments insisted on reopening schools.  (September is too soon for winter to start forcing people inside.)

On the one hand, hurrah for the diligent public servants at StatsCan, who are carefully tracking the one metric that really matters when evaluating a public health response to a pandemic.  On the other hand, our political leadership could do with a couple brisk whacks from the Haddock of Remonstration so subsequent contact by the Salmon of Knowledge has a chance to register in useful degree.

The centre cannot hold

I really don't understand why anyone is surprised about the Capitol mob or the general tenor of insurrection.

White supremacy is a construction of virtue.  And, apparently, much as a lot of white supremacists just assume everyone else really is utterly reflexively racist and pretends not to be out of a sort of point-scoring public hypocrisy, a lot of people assume white supremacists know their axioms are wrong, and just keep going out of sheer meanness.

That's not an accurate understanding.

Somewhere between five and eight thousand years ago, you start seeing this bottleneck in Y chromosomes in human populations.  This is correlated with the rise of patriarchal forms of social organisation, but of course we don't really know what happened.  We can see the results of the selection event, but not details. (Five thousand years, given twenty-five year generations, is two hundred generations.  Twenty generations is more than sufficient to domesticate foxes.  OF COURSE selection happened, and probably quite a lot of it.  Can we tell what?  No we can't.  We haven't got the start state.)

So; humans are subject to selection.  Some of it's obviously genetic -- you can see that Y-chromosone bottleneck in the data! -- and you can tell what it is (a really small proportion of male lineages are siring almost all the kids, and this is generational; a successful sire's sons are frequently themselves successful sires) but you can't tell _why_ it is.  There's no way to distinguish between strongman harem systems and "only a very small proportion of men were calm and peaceful enough to live in the fixed settlements that arose with agriculture". (It could be both.)

Somewhere around five hundred years ago -- twenty generations, still enough to domesticate foxes; can't hardly bet that isn't enough to alter humans in the brains -- the pirate kingdom starts; you get this maritime marcher state building on the loot-sharing customs of longbow armies, and virtue becomes _obtaining_ loot.  (As distinct from the holding or the earning of land, and it's not much of a jump, considering how either of those happened during the transition from feudalism to god-king autocracy.)

There are a couple-three things to note about this.

One, it works.  Look at where people speak English today.  Look at the British Museum or the Smithsonian.  Look at the two solid centuries of thalassocracy.  Look at what didn't happen to that mob in the US Capitol.

Two, status is part of the loot.  And in a very basic way, that's _primate_ status; I can hit who I want and fuck who I want, status.  It's not nice-gold-watch-at-retirement status, or respect-of-your-peers status.

Three, white supremacy is a highly derived loot-sharing agreement.  It's much more complicated than counting out the cattle in the herds you stole or the gold doubloons from the Spanish Main.

The modern white-supremacist coalition has three main threads.

There's mammonites, who sincerely believe money is the material love of god and that they, personally, should have all of it.  This is the party of loot, very broadly defined; they won't tolerate any limits on theft. It's important to remember that their beliefs about money are entirely false to fact and that most of them have a niggling awareness that if they stop lying so fast about money some finance minister somewhere might notice.  And generally they're the sort of person who can loot a billion dollars and feel broke; their insecurity is boundless.

There's the active supremacists; generally people who have little else.  They're useless, they know they're useless, and it makes them extremely insecure about status.  This is (by far) the most numerous group, and it won't tolerate any limits on violence.  (Their insecurity management is directly contrary to their best interest; prosperity arises in cosmopolitan cities.  No amount of wanting status will allow them to tolerate those, though, so there's this feedback loop that prevents them from having any other source of status.)

There's the aristos; this is the group who are certain they should be in charge.  It's not that far off the born-to-wealth-and-power version of the xenophobes, only it's not that they can't stand seeing people who don't look like them, it's that they can't stand people who do not reflexively obey them, ideally out of such fear and deference that they put a lot of effort into figuring out what the aristo wants and delivering that without the aristo having to do anything so lower class as to say what they want. They inherited money; they have inherited connections, status, and power.  The important thing is still having people do what they say because they said it, because their own ability is certainly not sufficient to accumulate the money or create the connections, status, or power.  They won't tolerate any limits to their authority, and it's mostly structural authority, so they're opposed to change unless it makes things better for them, and better for them is worse for everyone else.

Are these three groups using each other?  Absolutely.  Do they want the same things?  Not at all; the xenophobes would certainly like money, and the mammonites want all of it.  (There's probably a name for the idea that god loves only you, but I don't know what it is.)  Are they a cohesive, evolving response to keeping a loot sharing agreement working in a world that's run out of loot?  Absolutely.  Do they think they're doing what is mete, right, and their bounden duty?  Also absolutely.  They're generally upset that they have to; the people lower down in the hierarchy should know their place, after all, and the government should know that it exists to make it easier for them to do whatever they want.

(Consider the dreary list of destructive acts in national parks during the most recent government shutdown.  Consider the blithe indifference to death in response to a pandemic, as long as it's someone else's death.  There's a clear worldview and strong expectations involved, along with the complete disdain of facts or society.)

All of what we've seen with Trump is the expected continuation of a long-term "I shall have loot as it was in grandfather's day" political movement. It's a mutant white supremacy which was itself a mutant patriarchy, and it never has made any material, factual sense.  ("I'm easily sunburned so I am obviously so morally superior I can declare anyone or anything mine" is the kind of thing you're severely disappointed when a five year old comes up with it.  It's abject nonsense.  This has never mattered, and does not matter now.)

How do you keep that cohesive system from copying itself into the future?

There are three traditional approaches.

You make adhering to the belief system fatal.  (This is why you've never met a Cathar.)

Ethnogenesis; something like the rise of Islam produces a new definition of who people are and new relationships among them.  (If you want to get rid of the idea of whiteness, this is the minimum ante.)

Outside context problem.  Bronze Age collapse, pretty much every civilisation in the Americas and then alien diseases showed up in the Columbian interchange, water empires when the rainfall moves; lots of examples.  (if you think climate change isn't an outside context problem you need to go read some of the science.)

So, no, "status quo ante" isn't going to work.

Saying "we will all be Americans", without the outside context problem, didn't work last time, but it won't hurt much.

Saying "we will all be Americans and no one can be all that rich" (because money is agency and most of the problem is a small number of extremely rich people determined to rearrange society to minimise their insecurities rather than doing the work themselves) would be a start; it might be enough to get people up in favour of it.  (Liberal democracy is stone dead; the time and context (and planet to loot) necessary to its existence have passed, and are with us no more.  We're picking the least-bad alternative future.)

Saying "we will all be good neighbours to everyone who will be good neighbours to us, no one can be rich, and open-loot extractive capitalism ends; we will live here forever, and must care for what we have borrowed from our descent" didn't work last time, either, but there weren't all that many people trying the first time.

But! don't think the work can be avoided.  Reconstruction didn't happen.  (Truth and Reconciliation didn't happen in the Canadian example.)  If we want to keep anaesthetised dentistry (and we so do), we've got to pull of ethnogenesis during an outside context problem, and we've got to create a different industrial civilisation to do it, AND we've got to win the fight with the mammonite white supremacists while we're doing it, because they're complete against. Death before responsibility; death before they give up the right to loot.

This is a hard task; this is the kind of excessively difficult task that makes it so much easier to descend into moral dithering, pointless moral taxonomies, and claims that everyone would be fine if....

People aren't going to be fine.  This is probably the decade agriculture fails.  And all these would-be heroes are managing to care that people fear them, because then they feel better.  There is no possibility of doing actual work; any real striving is an opportunity to fail, and they've already failed.  That's what they're fleeing; there's no more loot, the world is worse than it was, and they made it that way.  They can at least club together and pretend that nothing important can, has, or will ever change.

An observation

 It seems painfully clear -- three orders of magnitude clear, measured in corpses -- that the difference between successfully handling COVID-19 and failing horribly in handling COVID-19 is the willingness to enforce a quarantine.

To enforce a quarantine, you have to be willing to both feed and house people.  If you won't, the quarantine can't and won't work.

It seems clear that various mammonite governments in the Anglosphere absolutely will not do that; given a choice between feeding and housing people, or a massive recession brought on by a large increase in excess deaths, they're picking the corpse pile because feeding people is wrong.