Plague time

Reproduction causes evolution.  COVID is reproducing in billions of hosts, and as a result keeps evolving.

It's important to know that very small biochemical changes can cause large changes in how transmissible or how lethal a virus is; you get those by luck, but the more reproduction, the more opportunity.  At this point, it feels like it's only a matter of time.

The other thing that's a matter of time is extirpation; we could, in principle, do it in a month.  It would take wanting to do it and being prepared to house and feed everybody for the month everything is shut down, but it could be done.

Otherwise?

It's unlikely we're going to see better conventional vaccines.  The two outstanding options are unconventional vaccines -- nasal vaccines, treatment of lung mucous producing cells to produce much more ability to trap viruses, reproducing vaccines etc. -- and novel art such as d-protein wet nano-machinery.  That's going to take time; it's going to take more work because the rate of change in the virus will compel an approach on fundamentals, rather than current dominant virus traits, and that's inherently more difficult.

Possible?  In a functioning post-industrial information economy, sure.

Do we still have that?

Somewhat.

Are we going to lose that?

When we lose field agriculture, yes.  

Possibly sooner; Thwaites glacier is probably going to go this decade, which means a lot of coastal sea level rise.  That's going to affect transportation; maybe not enough to stop container shipping as such (tide allowances in ports might be able to handle the initial rise most of the time) but it won't help. (A one metre rise might be enough to cut the trans-Canada and the railroad east of Sackville; Halifax continuing to function as a port will be less relevant in that circumstance.)

If we still have COVID circulating when either field agriculture goes or Thwaites collapses, it's going to stay circulating.

COVID extirpation ought to be a much larger priority, given that we can't stop either the loss of field agriculture or the Thwaites collapse.

Blockades go slower than you think

Always.

Everybody expecting relatively quick Russian collapse in Ukraine from logistical self-asphyxiation is forgetting this.

Yes, truck maintenance has been dire in the Russian army. Yes, they're stalled.  Yes, they're plausibly going to be completely out of trucks in a month, give or take. That doesn't mean they're not going to do everything possible -- including commandeering civil vehicles -- to try to keep going.

In 1914, everyone expected a short war.  It had to be a short war; the ability to supply munitions for a long war didn't exist, and in addition Imperial Germany had no supply of nitrates. (At that time mined from bird guano on ocean islands.)  A technical fix was found.  There isn't a technical fix for not doing your maintenance, but there's still a long way to drop the Russian standard of living before having to admit that there's no way to maintain supply.

This is all kinds of bad; more people die, more destruction, and more uncertainty of outcomes.  

Not the overall strategic outcome, though I hope the US Secret Service has figured out how much enhanced risk Biden's in right now.  Trying for an organised coup this time is going to seem like a salvation option around last week if the folks in the Kremlin are getting accurate intelligence, because if the blockading power -- that being what sanctions are in this more civilised and more connected world -- can maintain the will, the blockade will work.  This usually won't be admitted until an awareness of general starvation is inescapable, and that takes time.

Short Supply

 There's been some online muttering about housing shortages, taking care of the existing homeless, and so on, due to the announcement of an open visa program for Ukranians who wish to come to Canada.

There's a political answer -- housing, in all its multifaceted glory, is a provincial responsibility; ask your premier what changes they're making -- but there's a systemic answer, too.

After the Second World War, the chosen engine of economic progress was houses and cars; the cars would get you to your house in the suburbs.  Building roads, making cars, and pumping gas would drive an increase in prosperity.

This has a bunch of consequences; aside from breaking agriculture and killing us all by atmospheric carbon load, it means that "middle class" now means "owns a house".  It means that the return-maximising strategy for housing doesn't house everybody, so there are negative incentives for housing the homeless for every individual actor in the system. (From a systemic perspective, there's no end of "that costs less", but status! but system? that can tax!, and so on prevent this from having much meaning.  People act out of a pragmatic construction of self-interest and effectively nothing else.)

Then you throw in the "real estate as money laundry" problems and you've got an active mass of agency working to prevent anything from ever working differently.  And how it works now works to guarantee that short supply because a shortage increases prices and all the agency rests with people who have the perspective of sellers and controlling the supply.

The fix for housing shortages isn't keeping refugees out; it's to stop treating housing as a profit centre for the overclass.

Public-backed (and thus regulated) housing collectives; buy a building, buy a bunch of buildings, whatever scales well with thermal batteries, local energy storage, and handling the drainage in a time when a foot of rain in a day is going to happen.  People can pay into that, have transferable shares, and so on.  None of this is difficult, none of this requires public ownership, pretending there's no market, or even all that much alteration of land tenure.  It does take looking at "get everybody a place to live" as a material objective.