Should Ontario mandate masks?

 No.

We know that surgical masks aren't sufficient against Omicron; maybe 50% effective in practice.  Do not burn credibility on stuff that isn't effective, because pretending something is effective when it isn't burns credibility fast and there's already a deficit.  (Yes mask wearing has a statistical effect even with inadequate masks.  Not likely enough, and not likely emotionally for individuals.)

There's three things that should be done:

- pass a law requiring airborne precautions or better in all interior spaces, with an enforcement arm at least the same kind of enforcement power the fire marshall or the folks who inspect restaurant kitchens have.  If the inspection doesn't pass, the building isn't open.  Do this on the tightest materially possibly timeline, no exceptions.

- pass a law requiring elastomeric respirators with P100 filters for all indoor gathers at any time a designated airborne pathogen is known to be circulating.  Same law provides the things, and filters, and so on.  (Works better than masks; costs less than masks.  Existing industrial capacity.  Many options.  Put anti-price-gouging provisions in the law.  Consider direct production.)

- pass a law requiring daily public communication of Rt, down to the health authority if you can but certainly regionally as well as provincially.  The target is an Rt less than 0.5; if it goes over 0.5, all non-essential businesses are closed.  If it goes over 0.8, those close for in-person anything, schools close, and so on.  Do the communication about exponentials.  Point out this is the spreadingest disease in human history, lasting immunity isn't currently possible, and the damage is cumulative. (and nigh-certainly permanent.)  Rt is a real measurable thing and the lower we can keep it the faster the disease goes away.  Communicate that, and keep communicating that.

This will require spending public money to get that information about the current actual Rt, but that's an appropriate use in the first place.

The Feds need to pass a law that explicitly says "public health is a matter of national defense; just as you do not get a religious exemption from a blackout, you do not get a religious exemption from public health measures" and ideally start prosecuting the organized anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers as bioterrorists.  (Y'all do recognize that the money and push behind faith-based exceptions to the law are dominionists?  They want the civil law not to apply to them because they believe, and they're very focused on it.) 

Some border control is absolutely required.  A great deal of funding for the health care system is required, long term; we need to produce more nurses, more doctors, and more everything.  That's going to take a long time and it's a larger number than it would have been with better pandemic management.

An Ontario observation

Ontario health care policy under the Ford government is driven by a belief that there should not be any such thing.

"Privatization" is "give some guys access to a captive revenue stream", but none of Dougie's owners are old money who own insurance companies.  They're new money mammonites, generally developers, and they've decided that the revenue stream from taxes constitute their money.  Public spending is an affront before God unless the money goes to them.

Miscomprehension of scale

So the Globe and Mail discusses someone trying to arrange for policy to support the success of an investment.  

This looks like part of a general push against the federal fertilizer emissions cap.

I am unable to decide if that push is cynical or deluded or arises from a sincere mammonism where profit is an arbiter of wisdom.

But, anyway.

"I wish to become much richer, and for my descent to be richer than I am" is an unclean motivation.  Wealth as a survival strategy makes everything worse for everyone.  It's (relatively speaking) easy, and it fulfills the primate feels, but neither of those excuse it not working.

Someone can apparently recognize that there's an ongoing loss of farmland due to climate change and not connect that to emissions.  The point to the emissions reduction policy is to try not to lose more farmland; it's inadequate, insufficient, and too late, but the intent does recognize that fewer emissions means more food.   A position that it's only possible to grow food (or only grow food profitably) if there is no such cap devours itself.

If you have to have a large enterprise -- lots of capital -- to be viable, that means either you've got high capital costs or low margins.  (E.g., the lower grocery margins get, the larger the store needs to be, since costs are discrete for many things, rather than scaling.)  Farms keep getting larger; they've got poor and shrinking margins.  The "no cap" argument is that farm viability depends on the margin not shrinking.

Climate change is shrinking the margin for farming more than any effect of policy or markets.

Saskatchewan is west of the  meteorological Hundredth Meridian; in a hot climate system, it's expected to be desert.  (The Oligocene climate we might get, if we're lucky.)  If we cut all fossil carbon extraction to zero tomorrow, farmland in Saskatchewan is probably not useable for field agriculture by 2050 at the latest, since Arctic Amplification kicked off around 2000.

We can't fix that; all the carbon sequestration schemes are at least two of "but we can keep burning diesel, right?", extractive industry FUD, delusive techno-optimism, and confused about sequestration means.  (It has to be for geological time.  "In some sort of biomass" doesn't count, it's a hard problem.)  Even if one of them works, and can be adopted -- one of the ocean seeding schemes, say -- it doesn't solve the core "rains at predictable times" problem of keeping hydrologic stationarity.  Reducing the average temperature of the earth doesn't make the rain come at predictable times.

The domain of necessity says we need to do three things -- stop adding carbon to the atmosphere, figure out how to provide food without field agriculture, and since our current social systems can do neither of those things, we need to collectively organize ourselves differently.

That's really challenging.  It's apparently not as challenging as recognizing that money does not dissolve all troubles.

End of the Englightenment?

 I've seen this come up a few times lately.

Somebody synthesized perfluorocubane recently.  ("fluorinated esters as starting materials with dissolved fluorine gas in a perfluorinated solvent at low temperatures".)  Methodological naturalism is fine.  The philosophical framework of a knowable universe is fine, too.

A whole bunch of other things are not at all fine, but all of those come down to something simple that has nothing at all to do with social collapse or mysterious moral enervations.

Greed is a sin.

That's it.  All the rationalizations about how some particular flavour of greed is virtue, really it is, are how we get the things not being fine.  Greed is still a sin.

That's all.  There's nothing more to it.  Try to avoid having the mammonite propaganda get to you.

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.

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.

Try to solve the problem

Having people about their lawful occasions get shot is intolerable.

We're doing a poor job of dealing with it. (I mean Canada.  The US is actively not dealing with it.)

Right now, in Canada, "gun control" is understood to mean "this thing makes the RCMP nervous and they don't want you to have it".

That's a terrible basis for policy.

Right now, in the US, "gun control" is understood to mean "they're trying to abolish white supremacy and we're going to murder them if they try".

That's a terrible basis for policy, too, and the Canadian version is only just sorta a layer over the US version for Canadian purposes anyway. (Look at the response to the long gun registry; "how dare you say I'm bad?" as a wedge issue to mainstream white supremacy, and the wedge issue response worked, politically.)

The general case of the terrible basis for policy is "it's OK to murder people who upset you".  It's an essential component of white supremacy. (Look at how killing people with a car is viewed.  Guess where that set of "it's OK, mostly" beliefs leaked in from?)  (The general cultural drift as the money gets more and more nervous about experiencing consequences is "only cops are white".  That's highly suboptimal.)

"I should be able to murder people who upset me" is a belief.  You cannot fix a belief with legislation, and you surely cannot fix a belief quickly; changing beliefs is a long-term project.

The correspondingly unhelpful belief that somehow you can suppress firearms comes down to failing to notice that enough policing to suppress firearms ownership is inherently oppressive; structurally, it risks a recapitulation of drug policy as a mechanism of oppression.  (If we're finally having a collective rush of sense to the head about drug policy, the systems that exist to enact the current policies want to keep existing; they're going to look for another basis of oppression because oppression is profitable.)

What can you do?

Find a competing belief and "give it salt"; figure out what your measurable objective is, and pursue it; remember that rights isn't a stable construction, and obligations can be, if done with care.

Making it less abstract:

The competing belief is safety; modern sport shooting cultures are really big on safety practices.  There's a lot of people with self-image invested in being competent with firearms where competent includes being safe.

The measurable objective has three parts; people aren't getting shot, the police have less power, and the means of achieving this has a broad social consensus supporting it.

Any gun is an expensive wall hanging without ammunition.  The point is not "you can't own that", the point needs to be "you can't have sole control of that"; most especially, you can't have sole control of ammunition and a gun.

When should an individual have control of both the gun and the ammunition?  When they're on a range; when they're hunting; when they're sufficiently rural they might have to do their own animal control.  (Indigenous persons are presumably subject to their band or nation's policies.)  "Hunting" and "rural" involve small amounts of ammunition.

There's a gun club.  Gun club members have collective civil responsibility for each other's use of firearms, whenever and wherever.  You can buy ammunition through a gun club or through the ministry that issues hunting licences.  If you have ammunition in your home, that's limited in amount and applicability (for what you have in your home and only for what you have in your home).  If it's in your home, it's a long arm, and it's not self-loading.

At the gun club, nothing is in sole control until you're on the range.  But you can own anything; if you are sufficiently in to turning money into noise that you want to own an M2 Browning HMG, you can do that.  You just have to go through the club armorer to get the thing out of storage and you have to go through the club check in procedure to get on the premises and you have to go through a your-key-and-two-other-officers-of-the-club process to obtain ammunition.  (It can be your ammunition; you just can't have sole control of it.)

Transportation to and from ranges is between gun clubs; it's done by the gun clubs, it involves some kind of bonded courier, and individuals aren't involved.  

Transportation for hunting involves separate transportation of arms and ammunition; never the same vehicle.  (You're not going  hunting alone, are you?)

Transportation on purchase to your rural abode is by the same kind of delivery courier who would deliver to the gun club for both arms and ammunition.

All of this is logistics.  It's commercial regulations; there are commercial regulations for the transport of chemicals that are all of mutagenic, carcinogenic, teratogenic, corrosive, explosive, and hypergolic.  Commercial regulations can handle the logistics part just fine.

So the folks into shooting sports get something they want -- unrestricted small arms ownership -- in return for undertaking a collective obligation of safety.  They're already into safety.  That's the salt and the obligation.  It also turns firearms regulation into a matter of civil regulation in which the police aren't involved; expensive, but not a lethal risk.

The police get something they want -- an expectation that no one is carrying -- but they aren't responsible for firearms regulation; they're subject to it, and it's the same rules as the general population. (Making the police a special armed caste is intolerable to democracy.)  No armed police reduces the number of people getting shot, too.  (You wind up with a judicially-controlled military branch to do armed response on those occasions this might be required, and they are intensely not police.  They exist to deal with your rebellion against the Queen's peace. They're embedded in a budget that doesn't want to spend on them, which is important.)

If you're unable to convince a gun club they're safe with you on the range, you just can't have a firearm at all.  That's your obligation if you want to own a gun.  (If you're rural, you're going to have some logistical burden about this, but that's manageable.  So is the bureaucratic overhead of harmonizing all the safety standards and making sure there are safety standards.)

The core safety policy -- no sole control of a weapon and ammunition -- is what militaries the world over use. This is because it's the simplest thing that works.

Gun control would be a stupid thing to fight about, politically, when we need to be decarbonizing.  But it really does look like nigh-all of the proposals are trying for control, instead of success.

Stay at home 🟨🟨

 The three things you need to know:

1. the more long-distance travel there is, the more aggressive a pathogen can be and not go extinct by killing all the hosts it can reach what with being able to reach more hosts
2. if you keep adding long-distance travel, there's an abrupt transition between extinction being unlikely and extinction being nigh-certain for the host population. We know this point exists but not how to identify it in the real world.
3. if you think this doesn't apply to extractive economic behaviour as well as diseases, you need to contemplate the concept of "model" a little more.

Oh, and monkeypox?  Current doubling time is around a day and a half. In a disease with a long — two week — incubation period and a historically low transmissibility.  Tends to hint that many more people have it than know they have it.  It'd be useful to know what's going on.

Available facts as of a day or so ago.  Note particularly that the virus is durable, fomite transition is absolutely a thing, and hand washing doesn't kill it.  Alcohol does and dilute bleach does.

Also note that there is no way pox viruses do not spread and if you go look at the 19th century literature it takes completely seriously the idea that V. major could spread through the air.  Prudence would not limit concern to droplet transmission.

ETA: There's a Lancet paper on treating this variant of monkeypox in humans:

Prolonged upper respiratory tract viral DNA shedding after skin lesion resolution challenged current infection prevention and control guidance.

That is, the traditional-with-pox viruses guidance that after the lesions scab over and the scabs fall off you're not contagious anymore?  With this pox virus, that's wrong. Effective treatment involves at least a month of strict isolation of the patient, and we purely do not have the capacity to do that for very many people. 

The difficulties of enough

Elsenet, Brad Delong is struggling with an elevator pitch for Slouching Toward Utopia.

(I am writing this at noon, and it is dark enough for the street lights to be on; storm front coming through and I can just barely see the red stop lights two hundred metres away. None of the buildings on that street are visible.)

I am sympathetic; my book summaries are notoriously unhelpful.  Still, I think most of the problem is that Brad has masterful knowledge of the how and a terrifically shaky grasp of the why.

The "how" is that starting in about 1870, human productive capacity became immense and that for the first time, everyone could have enough.  The "why" is that is not what happened; this is clearly not a utopia. Why not?

This is, alas, easy, but you have to have looked at systems theory and enough evolutionary biology that iterated survival starts to have emotional meaning as the underpinnings of all life.

When there isn't enough, the only way for you to have enough is to take it.

You can't do that by yourself; someone will murder you in your sleep if you try.

A group gets created; we have enough.  It is right and proper that we have enough, even if they are starving.

Taking makes the pie smaller; the fighting you have to do to take doesn't make anything but waste and corpses.  (Notoriously! oppressed populations are poor because there is no way not to be poor.  Hel's Teeth, look at Disney's Robin Hood movie from the days you could say such things aloud. Everyone knows this.)

What you want when there's enough is for everyone to have enough, and for everyone's safety to depend on collective action.  Personal authority, taking, and concentration all hurt far more people than they help.  You need to get rid of taking for everyone to have enough.

You cannot do this because the wealthy and powerful will not allow it; they are safe, and you want to make them less safe.  (They'd have to obey laws if they weren't as rich as they are.  They really would be less safe.)

That everyone else would be safer, that everyone would have enough, and that everything would get better do not matter. That we might not go extinct by replicating the End Permian does not matter. For thousands upon thousands of years, the way to be safe was to take.  The old ancestral wisdom says you never stop taking, and the rich and powerful are not about to stop now. (If you are them, it is working.  What they want, they have.)

Systems function to keep existing; to copy themselves into the future. That is the iron law of bureaucracy; it's also the iron law of status and of life.  If you don't copy yourself into the future, you and everything like you goes away.  If it's not there it doesn't matter.  Every system that exists now survives while surrounded by other systems that exist to take.  Everything exists on the basis that the only safety comes from taking.  (From people and from the earth, under various loot sharing agreements, but to take.)

No one with status and power will accept a reduction in their status and power.  (Which is why office holders in democracies inevitably start getting given money and position upon retirement.  It's easier; it does not offend the norms.) No one with status and power will accept that it is wrong to take.  Everything they know says it is right; they have taken, and it has given them all that they might desire.

We don't have utopia because we can't, not with this society, and the risk of trying might make the Thirty Years War look like a game of chequers.

The plague and the other plague and the starvation and the rising awareness that we really are trying to replicate the End Permian and that there isn't any time left to not suffer the consequences are going to result in attempts anyway.

It would help if the idea of collective action -- broad civil collectivism; a fellow citizen might not be your sibling but is your cousin -- was out there, rather than a question of who does the taking.

It would help if the acknowledgement that greed is a sin and cannot be made virtue was out there, too.  That there is no legitimate reason to seek wealth.  (General and collective prosperity, absolutely.  "Take more, for me"?  No.)

No slaves

 The United States' progress towards naked theocracy has ratcheted up.

It seems the opposition doesn't understand what they're opposing; or at least, there isn't much in the way of evidence for it.

Somewhere, Fred Clark — Slacktivist — notes that the reason for abortion as a political issue was to recover the white evangelical position of moral superiority after they were publically and discreditably on the wrong side of civil rights.

I would call that well-supported as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.

Politics is about power: the ability to compel others to abide your will.

The moral authority was just authority; the power to say what is normal. (And if you aren't normal, you had better start; if you don't, you get hurt until you either become normal or die.)

The present political problem — the inability to do what needs doing because the right refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of facts — arises because of an alliance between factions who want to own women, factions who want to own workers, and factions who want to own those people.  (Factions which, de facto, generally do own women, workers, or those people.  But not enough; society doesn't thank them for it, not directly enough.  The void still yawns.)

That's the problem.  Almost everything else — including the probable Alito decision from the US Supreme Court — is a symptom.

One of the symptoms is a belief in morals; morals don't scale.  Morals are personal, a matter of taste and history and aesthetics.  (The parallels to social conformity in dress are strong.)  You can't make effective policy out of morals and you certainly aren't going to make an effective insurrection out of morals. (Whatever you would like history to say.)

The best don't lack conviction; the best lack an awareness that the system got built, is indeed built every day, and can be built different.  They're trying to be good.  The slavers want to own people; then they'll call it good.

Do not teach your children to be good; teach them to be effective.

That the good do nothing

That bit about the triumph of evil is a cognitive trap.

Good and evil, as ideas, are a cognitive trap.

Trying to be good will fail.  Always, at all times, in all things.

Morals can function on very small scales; sometimes individuals, maybe immediate family groups, just possibly some kind of voluntary association with few people.  Otherwise, the belief that one must be moral produces post-facto rationalizations.  It doesn't produce uniform or cohesive conduct and it does produce a lot of murder as people make attempts to make other people be moral out of fear.  (Because if you're not moral, anything bad can happen to you and be correct.  It's a mutation of a social control mechanism.)

What you're seeing is the pursuit of a simple material optimization versus a bunch of people saying "but it's complicated!". Of course "it's complicated!" is losing; it is complicated, but that doesn't matter today.  Complicated matters tomorrow.  The simple material optimization matters right now.

This is the great and intractable problem of money; money abstracts interaction.  (Not production, not wealth; money has value because it's exchanged.  So you get a proxy for agency and thus security.)  Once you have this abstraction, "I want all the money" is simple, material — it's not money if you can't count it — and uniformly destructive because things are complicated and tomorrow comes.  More and more agency is required to maintain the illusion of security, until you've got the present, where it's explicitly policy to cause extinction in preference to acknowledging any idea of in-principle limits on the amount of money one person can have.

An effective response cannot arise from "it's complicated!"; maniacal single-mindedness in pursuit of money is unable to care that it's complicated.

It needs a simple material rule.

There are a bunch; life expectancy, agency, security (of person, food, place...), all function as positive rules.  Bounds-driven instead of norms-driven society.  The necessary negative rule is that if you try to get rich, the civil power will prevent you.  (Because you can have security by collective means, or you can have the possibility of security by wealth; you can't have both.  Observation makes this painfully obvious.)

This goes with a supremacy of the civil power approach in politics; your belief doesn't matter, you must argue for a material outcome.

Trying to be good will fail.  Always, at all times, in all things.  Pick a measurable material outcome; that has the possibility of success.

And the shape of the world is changed

We are going to stop using fossil carbon.  (Maybe intentionally, maybe as a consequence of collapse, but one way or another, fossil carbon extraction is going to stop.)  Presently, fossil carbon is the foundation of all power; the global hegemon is the Oil Empire and the global economy is comprehensively dependent on fossil carbon inputs for everything.

Thwaites Glacier is going; the sea shall rise.  Rebuilding every container port in a decade is not an option.

It's generally acknowledged that we're going to overshoot 1.5 C average warming; we are very likely now inescapably going to overshoot 2.5 C of average warming which means field agriculture stops working. (You have to know roughly when and roughly how much about the rain to farm.)

If COVID-19 has a one percent chance to kill you and you catch it every year, we may observe that 0.99 to the 50th is 0.605.  That's three hundred and ninety five chances in a thousand that you'll be dead by fifty.  This is an indefensibly optimistic number; subsequent cases are worse, it looks a lot like the two constants of COVID-19 infection are brain shrinkage and cellular ageing, and you can catch it again in twenty days.  Plus that one percent is only the prompt lethality from the acute disease.  The expectation that this is the whole lethality is not well founded.  (Plus the charming possibility that the 1980s theoretical prediction about a sufficiently infectious disease that does not confer sterilizing immunity on the survivors leading to chaotic modes of spread is correct.  That would pretty much guarantee a steady supply of new variants at unpredictable times.)

The status quo ante pestis is gone; the Peace of Dives is gone, too, to whatever extent those were different things.

Politics is locked in a sort of "preservation of the existing order versus overt and immediate genocidal white supremacy"; insecurity management by "I have it good, keep it good" versus insecurity management by  "it's getting bad, kill every identifiable outgroup so I have relatively more".

Neither can possibly work; the good will not persist, on the one hand, and war is waste and desolation and loot does not last, on the other.  Some politics of resiliency — this is code for banning great personal wealth or anything else that functions as a "I'm rich, I'm fine" approach to insecurity management — would be nice, but of course it has to win the fight with the incumbent power structure, and there's no sign of anyone in politics with "maybe we could all live in the future?" views having escaped the desolation of morals to start talking about material outcomes.

Me, I'm going to take advantage of a startling warm day to go see if I can look at some birds.  (Our agricultural practices and nocturnal over-lighting having not yet rendered all of them extinct.)

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.

Your life expectancy is dropping

 Yes, really.

Whether or not you personally have had COVID-19 in any of its variants.

Whether or not you personally shall ever have COVID-19 in any of its variants.

Of the things we can alter (the past we cannot alter, which is where both what's already happened to you and your genetic inheritance reside), life expectancy sits on public health -- clean water, restaurant kitchen inspections, vaccination programs, and so on -- and the health care system.

Public health is subject to the same mammonite pressures (that is, abolish it as a barrier to profits) as everything else; public health is subject to the same supply chain problems as everything else.  Public health is subject to the same labour shortages as everything else.  It's at the very best not improving.

The health care system's damaged; the health care system's actively ablating as trained personnel are lost faster than they are being replaced.  The people still working in the system have been traumatised and aren't making the decisions they might have made without that trauma.

"Oh, well, the future's pretty terrible, I don't care if I live to get old" is one response to this.  It's mistaken -- lost life expectancy doesn't wait for you to get old, on the one hand, and the current likely outcome for someone in most of the developed world is that the health care system does keep you alive, but it doesn't manage to do anything about restoring quality of life, on the other.  But that is certainly a response.

A politically nihilistic response, that's not going to do anything fortunate for those of us who still don't want to die.

So what can we do?

Politics.

Thing zero is abolishing mammonism, which means income and asset caps, so no one is all that much richer than their fellow citizens and democracy has the option of functioning.  That's going to take awhile, but it's important to remember that's where things need to go.

Thing one is making the effort and paying the money to build a health care system that can cope; that means things like doubling medical student admissions, something like quintupling nursing student admissions, getting an operations research team or six involved in rooting out the "of course a doctor can work a 12 hour shift and make excellent decisions the whole time" 19th century structural hangovers, and most places in the OECD, building more hospitals; get the (staffed!) beds-per-thousand ratio up to 10 or higher.  Find the logistical bottlenecks -- including in specialist training -- and fix them. That's going to take awhile, too, but not as long.  (Do it by training to excess of requirements; we want this to be a global fix.)

(Yes, this does involved admitting that medical care, most places, is rationed by system cost, not outcomes, and that this was not a sensible policy decision to make; that the structure of the question was wrongly chosen, and not just about this.  Facts are only so patient; eventually one must deal with them.)

Thing two -- which ought to be entirely obvious by now -- is policy that acknowledges that COVID-19 will not go away on its own, and that the presently rich who are trying to insist that it must are doing so out of a self-interest that literally does not care who dies, if society keeps functioning, or if humanity goes extinct. (That one is more fossil carbon, but the indifference has been built in to the response to anything else.)  

COVID-19 will go away if and only if we get our collective act together and kill it.  The sooner we kill it, the more comprehensive and complete an effort we make to kill it, the less it costs.  Costs in money, time, people, anything.  Full mobilisation happens because it works, and you can't afford to lose.  COVID-19 is one of those things and this is one of those times.

(Where I live has a long way to go: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=HEALTH_REAC and a five-year surgical backlog that only stays that short if there isn't another COVID wave.)

Wear your mask

The pandemic is an insidious threat -- you cannot sense its presence -- and there's no instrumental means of detection (unlike other common insidious threats like electricity and methane).  All the indicators are lagging indicators; we can know where it was, not where it is.

What that means is you do not know -- you cannot know -- what your risk is.  It is by-definition impossible to know what your risk is.  (Remember that while it's statistically unlikely that you personally happen to be standing next to the person who was so startlingly fortunate as to have the "lethal as MERS" Omicron mutation occur during their initially asymptomatic infection, that's not a statement about your risk.  It's a statement about how likely that event is in the population, given a certain set of assumptions.  Your risk? inherently unknown.  Assume that the person next to you is shedding.)

Your single best means of avoiding death is to get (and keep getting) vaccinated.  This is not enough to prevent spread, and spread is how the disease gets worse.  So vaccination is not sufficient unto your civic duty.  You must also avoid infection.

Your single best means of avoiding infection -- and you want to avoid infection, because infection increases your risk -- is to wear a mask.  

Today, in the current state of the plague, wear a mask means a half-face respirator with a full gasket seal, no exhaust valve, and P100 filters.  (You're not a health-care professional with a need to dispose of your mask. You're going outside absolutely as little as possible -- which means you don't, unless necessary to avoid material harm -- you're bagging your mask in an impermeable plastic bag when you get home, and since it's a respirator, you can take the filters off and wash it from time to time.  Slather it with hand-sanitiser more frequently than that.  Yes, this costs more up front, but given that you're going to need it for at least the next year, your total cost is less this way.)

If you leave the house, you do it with the mask on.  It stays on the whole time you're out of the house.

When can we stop wearing masks everywhere?

When the disease is extirpated.

Given full population vaccination, universal mask use, and time, the disease will be extirpated.

Yes, there's a whole lot of public support required to get there; it's not as simple as always wearing your mask.  Yes, there are a bunch of evil people on Team Virus who think freedom means they are free to commit contagion.  At a minimum, don't be like that.  Wear your mask.

Duty requires.

Chaff in the fire

 I have to be careful with metaphors; what makes sense to me doesn't always make sense to other people, or they give me odd looks after awhile and say "how did you think of that?"

That's your caveat.

To a virus, an organism is fuel.

There is no normalcy for fuel in a fire.

The fire goes out on its own when the fuel is exhausted.  (We are not going to get into "heat, fuel, and oxidiser" because this is a metaphor; Aristotelian fire, if you will.)

If we want the pandemic to end, we have to end it.

What we've got right now (I'm in Ontario, Canada) is a government taking the view that using hoses is expensive and disruptive; you only use the hose when the fire is of a certain size and scope, and then you stop instantly when the fire is noticeably smaller.

If someone were to apply this policy to an actual house fire, it would be instantly recognised as lunacy.  You put the fire out, completely and definitively out, as quick as you can by any available means. If you can't put the fire out, you get out as fast as you can.

Since we're all in the position of being piles of dry hay while some spectral lunatic runs around with a lighter, you'd think we'd have noticed this is a problem in some politically meaningful way, but it turns out that we can't.  There's no effective opposition because the entire political system has been captured by mammonite axioms which say that the purpose of government is to guarantee the profitable conduct of business to the benefit of the incumbent rich.  Spending money to support the general prosperity or even keeping people from dying is unacceptable and wrong.

Ending the pandemic takes a bunch of things; they're all well-understood things. (A planned real shutdown for three weeks, which means everyone and everything commercial, which in turn means feeding people/paying them to stay home during; mandatory vaccination delivered to the home as a public service; enforced quarantines at borders with careful testing to exit; widespread and effective testing freely available in the population; track-and-trace with quarantine and enforcement powers; free effective masks for all; universal and continuous mask wearing outside the home; no public gatherings or non-essential human contact until extirpation.)

The critical, core, missing thing is the political will to do it, because an exercise of the civil power capable of ending the pandemic can do other things; it can decide to tax the rich, it can decide to decarbonise, it can decide to consign mammonism -- a belief we are watching unambiguously decide it's fine with killing every living human person if profits increase -- to the ash-heap of history.  Those in control prefer your death to any change in the status quo.

Many have died who need not have died.  Many have been harmed who need not have been harmed.

Our government is incompetent AND malicious.

It's past time to make an end of this.

Climate consulatation

Submission to the Environment and Climate Change Canada’s public consultation on Canada’s 2030 Emission Reduction Plan: 

I'm writing to you with my response to the public consultation, and to urge the federal government to act with the speed and scale necessary to tackle the climate emergency.

Nothing on the plan is anything more than whistling past the graveyard.

The predictions Arctic Amplification Hypothesis -- that an ice-free Arctic ocean leads to very rapid warming and a loss of hydrologic stationarity for a long period of time, hundreds to thousands of years -- have so far held.

That loss of hydrologic stationarity -- climate scientist for "it rains at predictable times, in predictable amounts" -- is the loss of agriculture.  No food means no nation.  (The PRC are "hoarding" agricultural products, if you read a certain segment of the press; alternatively, they're grimly aware of these events and recognise that their legitimacy as a government rests on preventing hunger.)

The appropriate response is threefold:

1. zero fossil carbon extraction and use everywhere the writ of the Government of Canada runs, as soon as materially possible (try for 2025; it should have been no later than 2000), without exception, by any necessary means.

2. replace agriculture to guarantee food security to all Canadians; this must be done by a diversity of sufficient means, because we cannot know today what means will work.  Indigenous methods should be a significant but not sole part of this.

3. infrastructure replacement so that the residential housing stock works in the climate we're going to have, so that we have a post-fossil-carbon transportation system, so that we've got widely distributed import-replacing primary industry able to maintain communications, anaesthetised dentistry, vaccination, and the infrastructure we've built.  All of this has to be built so the rising sea does not destroy it.

Time is short.

Careful scientific enquiry from multiple teams give the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica another five to ten years, after which we may expect abrupt sea level rise measured in metres.  (You do realise that a meter of rise notionally puts salt water almost to Montreal, or that two metres floods Fredericton and cuts the highway and rail line where they go around the Bay of Fundy?  Or that the actual, complex, result of hydraulic damming in the St. Lawrence likely floods both Montreal and Toronto?)

The appropriate response is _at least_ full national mobilisation as for an early 20th century global war, because those were much smaller threats than we face as the bill comes due for the Carbon Binge.

Sincerely,

Graydon Saunders