The four significant numbers, reprise

There's been some bits of "people don't trust the mainstream news" going by, and well, of course not.

There's a lot to say about structural problems, the "it's not justice if it's not general" issues and the "this is the wrong status quo and has been since the 1970s but the money will not acknowledge that" issues, but those are fundamentally secondary.

News is, by the philosophical necessities, about facts.  The current system gets all its feedback from feelings, so it presents feelings, and frequently prescriptive feelings.  It can't be news, and people do notice.

In plague times, the four significant numbers:

1. global case count 
• zero for thirty continuous months = party!
• not zero? no party
2. local Rₜ 
• keep this less than 0.5 (= disease dying out quickly)
• at 0.8, get emphatic (= diseases in reach of winning)
• at 1.0, it's domain-of-necessity time (= disease is winning)
3. life expectancy
• it's dropping
• it's plausibly dropping much more than one year per year
• it's not being reported by most Core nations
4. excess mortality
1. how we know the outcomes of policy generally
2. with causes, we know specifically where the system is failing
3. also not being reported by most Core nations nor political subdivisions thereof.

Actual news would be doing "how do we know", "what can this tell us", and "here's some trend forecasting" about these, but it would also be presenting these numbers every day as the core facts relevant to the pandemic.  

(Remember that the health care system exists to increase life expectancy and decrease excess mortality.  "How functional is the health care system today?" is a tactical worry about life expectancy and excess mortality systemic trends.)

Mamonite political capture and health care

There's a number of news stories about impending health care collapse, closed ERs, and so on.

We know with some lamentable certainty that the politics of every province in Canada (with the possible partial exception of Quebec) has been captured by mamonites.  It's been painfully obvious in the way pandemic policies have focused on protecting revenue streams over people.  (Something that is obviously disastrous in the long term, even for the revenue streams.)

From a mamonite perspective, the only insecurity management is individual and monetary; if you don't want to suffer a bad consequence, you must have the money to buy your way out of it.  If you can't, it's supposed to happen to you, and any collective action preventing the bad consequence is disputing the will of God. (Really. This is where the evangelical prosperity gospel has gone.)  Taxation is not a duty of citizenship; it's inherently immoral because it's in conflict with the will of God.

(Yes, I know what money is and where it comes from.  Mamonites do not see it as necessary to constrain their axioms with a respect for facts.)

So all the politicians consider health care collapse a feature; it does what they want.  It gets rid of single payer (and thus taxes); it gets rid of nurses' unions (anyone care to suggest how that's not a goal of the Ontario government, probably because it's a precondition of sale?  Nobody wants to buy a health care system to run it for profit when there are meaningful unions).  It lets them change policy in a deeply unpopular way that they nonetheless prefer and claim helplessness, there's nothing they can do, there's nothing to be done.

We're not going to magically see an effective policy response.  We're going to go right on seeing what we're seeing.  (And it's not like mass protest can avoid being a superspreader event.  Or would do anything; there's no belief in the legitimacy of the consent of the government.  We've quietly collapsed into full-on plutocracy.)

The other thing is that even if all the politicians were possessed by some benevolent entity that'd made a bet with the other benevolent spectral entities that it could fix the problem quickly, there isn't a fast fix.  Minimum training time for health care providers starts at about a year and goes up.

It's a bad time to wind up in hospital.  Wear your mask.  

(Wear your elastomeric mask.)

Updated to add:

This twitter thread refers to UK data; Ontario is generally a few weeks behind the UK, and UK still collect much better data than Ontario does.

From that thread,

In a province where disability benefits don't even leave you impoverished (the technical term is "destitute"), do you really think the mammonite analysis of the outcomes of COVID doesn't consider this pattern of outcomes a feature?

Catch COVID enough times and you'll be disabled.  But not on the time frame of this quarter's profits, so completely invisibly to mammonite policy.  Some sort of divine disfavour, has to be.

Insecurity and absolutism

 First thing—if you're in Canada, you may find  https://covid19resources.ca/ of use.  It's the collective effort of a number of people with specific expertise, and while they cannot magic good information out of non-reporting provinces, they've had a remarkably effective record of successful extrapolation.  It won't improve your state of mind whatsoever but better approximations of facts lead to better decisions.

Second thing—there's lots of moral absolutism going on, independently of people's priors.

Just about everything in humans comes down to insecurity management, and while the specifics of insecurity have a great deal of cultural and circumstantial variation, there's a common pattern:  If you can't reduce the material basis of your insecurity, you may well retreat into an illusion of control.  You get the illusion by refusing to hear anything that you don't like.  Generally you do that through some morally absolute construct or other.  And as more and more people do that around you, sticking to a materialist outlook becomes more and more challenging.

Right now, there are at least five major problems—

1. agricultural collapse
2. economic systemic collapse
3. climate excursion events (fire, flood, heat, etc.)
4. plague
5. the global theo-fascist movement

The civil power is not being exercised to solve any of these, so insecurity is remarkably high, and because it is high, people become absolutist in their outlook.  That makes things worse.

The general principle that insecurity is best managed through material change isn't great in the present circumstances—it's clear that the plutocrats aren't willing to accept that they won't be plutocrats anymore on any grounds of consequences, human extinction is preferable to not being a plutocrat anymore—but until material change to address those five major problems and happens and is seen to happen effectively, there's no prospect of reducing the retreat into moral absolutism.

In other words, it's a symptom, not a cause; deal with the cause, and the moral absolutism will substantially go away.

The purpose of the system…

 So there's this simple graph:

(Which I got from this tweet.)

Ontario Public Health's PACS—Post-Acute COVID Syndrome—percentage for "persists for at least six months" is also 20%. 

We don't know what's "long COVID"—not being able to clear the disease and having flare ups due to viral reservoirs—and what's lasting damage.  This is something we'd need years more data about, and we're all trapped in this horror movie before we know anything much.  We are now pretty sure that COVID is cumulative—having it this time makes having it next time more likely and worse—so the graph above is indefensibly optimistic in using constant odds.  Current circulating varieties have a lot of immune escape and are certainly infectious before people become symptomatic, so for planning purposes, everyone is infected. (Get an elastomeric respirator; get P100 cartridges for it; wear it continuously outside your dwelling. Try to live.)

You'd think this would be creating much more concern than the initial outbreak; we now know a lot more about how bad it is, and this is really notably bad.  A severe disease that doesn't create lasting immunity, which spreads prior to symptoms (so there's no selection pressure not to kill you), which causes loss of immune function, and which is easy to catch (to undersell the spreadingest disease in human history), is not something we've got a precedent for or much in the way of robust narratives. (Plus we move it around, and the outcomes for diseases with long-distance travel are different.)

So where's the concern?

Everyone making decisions with the civil power wants the world to be less complicated. 

 Whether that's because they really don't like having to pick success instead of control, because they don't care who dies as long as their profit numbers look good, because they're old and haven't got the mental flexibility anymore (gerontocracy is not good at sudden change), or because they actively want to forcibly simplify society until their slave-holding desires are something society cannot readily suppress doesn't really matter on the observational scale.  What matters is that there's a systemic failure; the people making the decisions want the world to be simple and aren't willing to live in a world that is not.  If they can only sacrifice enough of us, they'll get their wish; the world will be a lot simpler.

(No, China does not then win by default.  Global economic collapse doesn't do anything good for China and then they've got the same agricultural failure to worry about everyone else has got.  It's really past time to switch the narrative from man-versus-man to man-versus-past-mistakes.)

Scale matters

As an abstraction or a concept or something, money is this superposition of a medium of exchange and a store of value.  It has value because it is exchanged; if it stops being exchanged, the value goes away.  If it doesn't have a sovereign to protect it—to guarantee a certain predictability and consistency of exchanges against all comers—the value goes away, too, quite possibly because the exchange stops.

That's money on a scale of nation-states or the meta-scale of economies where you're talking about trade networks.

Another interesting scale is the personal; money is not, to an individual, what it is to an economy.  Money to an individual is the exchange rate between life span and agency.  However much money you get for giving up some amount of time determines the agency available to you.

When you look at it that way, it's obvious that the intractable constraint is time; individual people all have about the same amount.  The upper limit on the agency you can exercise is then set by either the exchange rate you can negotiate or the amount of other people's life span you can control.

Being extremely useful to a lot of people—being able to negotiate a high exchange rate for your lifespan into agency—has inherent limits.  Most notably, luck; becoming a wildly popular artist is not something you can arrange to do merely through skill and diligence.  Luck makes things inconsistent, and people generally loathe inconsistency.  They want to be sure what they'll have tomorrow and sure what they can give their posterity.

This drive for consistency and predictability produces structural pressure toward being able to co-opt as much of other people's life spans as you possibly can, because that maximizes your agency.  The more agency you have, the more you can produce consistent outcomes for yourself. Without some powerful constraint on the amount of agency any individual can obtain through the money economy (that is, how much of other people's life spans they can take) and a non-monetary economy to provide agency to the constraint, the money economy iterates toward a condition of nearly universal de-facto slavery—where you haven't got enough agency to meaningfully refuse anything—because that's what a money economy does.  It's an agency maximizer, but it's an agency maximizer only for the luckiest descendants of previous winners.  Everybody else has theirs taken away.

This is why you want to have and enforce income and asset caps that limit people to the amount of agency a not particularly lucky person could exchange their lifespan for.  That's the minimum constraint to have a system that won't iterate into a condition of near-universal slavery.