Agency contest

Today, food is extensively dependent on fossil carbon; the stylized fact puts it at ten to one by mass.  Every tonne of food required ten tonnes of fossil carbon as fertilizer and pesticide feedstock, in shipping the fertilizers, in powering the tractor, in making the tractor tyres, in shipping the food, and so on.  (Don't neglect food processing! A bag of raw wheat kernels isn't all that much like food.)

That's going to end.  How it ends is optional; that it does end is not optional.  

(Me, I note that there's this massive cash grab going on by oil companies.  They've had first-tier climate modelling since the eighties; I have this suspicion they're expecting Thwaites to go in the first half of this decade and they're not expecting oil transfer infrastructure or refining infrastructure at sea level to survive. It could be straight up political manipulation, too, but this feels more like cashing out.)

That this is going to end has made it into the public consciousness; food prices are driving inflation.

What does that do?

Politics is a contest about who gets the agency — who does what they want and who does what they're told, whose opinion matters, whose experience is heard — and only rarely is a political movement required to compare its beliefs to reality; having power means you can offload your insecurity on other people and make them deal with it.  (The trivial example is making your tenants pay for work-arounds to not fixing the building; electric space heaters, mopping up roof leaks, and so on.  The tenants don't have the agency to make the landlord fix it, so the landlord gets to transfer risks and costs to them, despite it notionally being the landlord's obligation to maintain the building.)

This is the end of an age; the Oil Empire comes to an end, the long Anglo Thalassocracy ends, the five thousand years of agricultural sedentism ends.  (You can only have agriculture if it rains in predictable amounts at predictable times. We're losing that, and no matter what we do now it gets worse for a century.  Never mind heat excursions and other issues.)

Which means that the political event horizon isn't five years; it's right now.

The thing to push for is not a return to any supposed status quo.  It's where you want to wind up.  (The end of an age is not a time to take a long view about current events.)

So not a resumption of mask mandates to mitigate COVID spread but real ongoing public health; double the training rate of doctors and triple the training rate of nurses, duplicate every hospital bed, indoor air filtering standards in the building code and backed up by the fire marshall, quantified policy (e.g. is Rt over 0.8?  EVERYBODY wears a respirator, no exceptions), and admission of responsibility for and financial support of PACS consequences.

Not a resumption of Roe (or re-opening a single abortion clinic in New Brunswick) but a national movement that you can't own people and specifically cannot own women, with everyone disagreeing being reduced to a condition of obedience by any expedient means.

Not an excess profits tax or a higher marginal rate on the rich but income and asset caps that abolish the concept of fuck-you money; everyone has the same political agency because everybody's got the same basic amount of lifespan.

Not income supports to offset inflation in food prices but a massive, every-nerve-and-sinew public program to decarbonize food production while replacing field agriculture.  (This is difficult, and urgent.  People have to eat every day.)

The people demanding no change because they've won and the people demanding to own women and the people demanding that someone tell them COVID isn't real are generally weak and incompetent; if they weren't, we wouldn't be in this mess and their views could stand democratic tests. (If they weren't, they'd be dealing with their mortality much better.)

Any expedient means time; the ideals of former days — equality before the law, consent of the governed, transparent public processes — have value, but the forms do not.  What matters is that we get something that works.

"Works" means nobody owns anybody and everybody has enough to eat all the way through the time of angry weather.  Everything after that is implementation.

Not the best news

 It's a preprint.

Whether or not you are vaccinated, subsequent COVID infections add risk of harm, and the degree of risk increases with each subsequent infection.

The short, simple summary is not "COVID hurts you every time you get it" — quite factual, but insufficiently clear — but "Every time you are infected with COVID the way it harms you makes the next time more likely and worse."

No kind of population immunity is possible[1]. A strategy of accepting infection to build immunity is now known to be harmful, instead of just suspected to be harmful. There's a finite number of times you can catch COVID before it kills you; this number is not knowable ahead of time and might not have two digits.[2]

[1] Vaccine effectiveness is not where it started; currently it's a one third reduction in the risk of death at six months from infection — 1.3 % for the vaccinated instead of 2 % for the unvaccinated — and about a fifteen percent reduction in your PACS risk[4].  It's halving your infection risk on the current Ontario numbers, instead of the 90% reduction it started as.  Selection is not your friend.

[2] absent precautions[3], you can expect to catch COVID multiple times per year, and your immune system is less able to avoid infection each time you do.

[3] Use air filters, wear an elastomeric mask with P100 filters (and consider goggles), minimize contact with other humans, DO NOT treat "outside" as safe (there have been super-spreader events outside), and get stroppy about it.  Also recognize that the official numbers are generally highly questionable most places, with underreporting of COVID deaths and no reporting of life expectancy decreases.

[4] if you're under 60. Over sixty, no reduction.