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Month: May 2023 Page 2 of 3
So, to reiterate how this works, each Covid infection has a good chance of doing damage to your body, especially to your brain, cardiovascular system and to your immune system, which does not become stronger, but rather disregulated and weakened against future infections, not just of Covid but of other diseases.
This damage may not be symptomatic, in which case you don’t have “Long Covid”, but it’s real. Each time you get re-infected there is a chance of more damage, and I’m almost entirely certain, an increased risk of Long Covid.
Long Covid itself can be mild, or it can be crippling. Millions of people now can’t work as a result and others are suffering and less able to work or to enjoy their lives.
We’ve had Covid as a pandemic now for about three years, and there is no end in sight. And yes, it’s still a pandemic even if the WHO has said “the emergency is over” and we’re all pretending it’s no big deal. In the US about six hundred people a day are still dying and that’s both certainly an under-count and doesn’t include deaths from things like heart attacks which are caused by Covid infections. Nor does it include people dying because hospitals are clogged up and it takes longer to get necessary care or diagnoses. (I’d say if one counted deaths where the death wouldn’t have happened without Covid its north of a thousand a day.)
Which leads to the social and political problem. We aren’t increasing health care staffing and funding to deal with a pandemic that never ends and with all the damaged people. We aren’t increasing help for people with disabilities or who can’t work or can work less. We are pretending that “the emergency is over” means we can go back to the world of 2019.
But we’ve decided to live with an ever-increasing number of disabled people, with a pandemic that never ends, and with an ever-increasing number of people with long term health problems caused by Covid, even if those people aren’t disabled. (Dead people are the least of the problem, from a social and political perspective, though not from a human one.)
Governments don’t want to pay for human welfare. They don’t want to pay to help the people the pandemic is hurting but not killing. They don’t want to increase the number of nurses and doctors and home care assistants and long term care facilities for disabled people who don’t live at home.
But more than that, I’m entirely certain that most governments will quietly put in places policies which make people harmed, but not killed by Covid, die faster, to get them off the books and reduce the strain and such increased costs as they can’t avoid.
Dead people are easy to deal with. People who are long term sick, not so much.
And even if you aren’t one of the people who are fucked up by Long Covid or sub-perceptual damage, this will effect you, because hospitals and other health care services remain slammed. You will get care later and worse care and delays stand a damn good chance of turning a problem which could have been handled easily into something much worse.
As with everything else in our society, you can pretend a problem isn’t real, or admit it is real and just do nothing, but the problem doesn’t go away because you ignore it. And if you ignore it long enough it can turn into complete catastrophe, as is true with climate change and ecological collapse, or as is true with all the problems caused by neoliberal policies (including, for Americans, the loss of their dominant world position and standard of living, something on the horizon if not fully here yet.)
As usual, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that the elites know that they personally will still get the very best care. But as with everything else, they won’t avoid the long term effects, because the Covid pandemic and thus increased levels of Long Covid and non-symptomatic but real damage will continue to accumulate in the population. Given how reinforcing cycles work, it is not hyperbole or exaggeration for effect to say that many societies may collapse under the strain of so much disabling and health damage.
But, if you don’t care about people, well, the solution is obvious: if they’re costing too much and enough money can’t be made off them, cull them.
And so it will be.
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Larger than I realized:
Now, per capita, it’s actually South Korea, Japan, USA, China and I wouldn’t say that doesn’t matter: it’s why Japan and South Korea stay prosperous (though life in South Korea, I gather, is rather nasty for workers.) Still, the bulk matters more: who’s in the lead.
The common rebuttal is that Chinese patents are low quality. So, let’s say that half of Chinese patents suck. They’d still be slightly in the lead.
It’s also interesting that Japan gets almost as many patents as the US. You don’t hear about Japan much these days (unlike the 80s when everyone was terrified) but they haven’t lost their game.
This chart echoes what I’ve been saying for years: the tech lead moves to where the manufacturing floor is. And that’s in China. Happened when it moved to the US from Britain and the US is not immune to the rule.
TechxManufacturing=Power in the modern world. If the US wants to change this, they have to re-shore industry, not just make half-hearted “friend-shoring” moves.
It’s also interesting how bad Europe does here. Germany+France+Britain=5%, which is half of South Korea. Europe is living off its legacy, and that means its decline is damn near certain if they don’t reverse this. Given the US is now poaching European industry, and Europe is letting it out of fear of Russia, well, the future doesn’t look bright.
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by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Population Decline Will Change the World for the Better
Stephanie Feldstein, May 4, 2023 [Scientific American, via Naked Capitalism 5-7-2023]
[TW: Feldstein’s article is representative of elite thinking on the issue of population growth, which is neo-Malthusian while straining to avoid the appearance of eugenics, which is considered very politically incorrect. Notably absent in this elite thinking is a sense of human purpose and even human grandeur, which used to be imparted by the ideology of civic republicanism before it was smothered by liberalism. Basically, human purpose should be to uplift and better the condition of all human beings, economically, materially, and culturally—in short, to build civilization. This does not mean humanity has absolute dominion to use and exploit nature at will. Rather, the human purpose includes a stewardship over nature: to continually explore and investigate nature and advance our understanding of nature, so that our use of nature and our relationship to nature become ever more aligned with the laws of nature. We know now that certain elements are toxic—in the 1950s, radium dosages were acceptable as a means of treating certain skin conditions, and widespread use and discharge of lead caused no concern. We also now realize that liberalism as political economy violates a number of laws of social science (very well documented in the 2009 book by Kate Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.) Fieldstone reflects some of these lingering ideas of civic republicanism when she writes:
Governments must invest in health care, support caregivers, help people who want to work longer do so, and redesign communities to meet the housing, transportation and service needs of older people. We need to move our economy toward one where people and nature can thrive. That means managing consumption, prioritizing social and environmental welfare over profits, valuing cooperation and recognizing the need for a range of community-driven solutions. These practices already exist—in mutual-aid programs and worker-owned cooperatives—but they must become the foundation of our economy rather than the exception.
We also need to bring together the reproductive rights and gender equity movements, and the environmental movement. Environmental toxicity, reproductive health and wildlife protection are deeply intertwined. Pollution, climate change and degraded ecosystems harm pregnant people, fetuses and children, and make it difficult to raise safe and healthy families.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that he was greatly influenced by Cotton Mather’s 1710 tract Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good.
There needs abundance to be done, that the Miseries of the World may have Remedies and Abatements provided for them; and that miserable people may be Relieved and Comforted. The world has according to the Computation of Some, above Seven hundred millions of people now Living in it. What an ample Field among all these, to Do Good upon! In a word, The Kingdom of God in the World, Calls for Innumerable Services from us. To Do SUCH THINGS is to Do Good. Those men Devise Good, who Shape any DEVICES to do Things of Such a Tendency; whether the Things be of a Spiritual Importance, or of a Temporal. You see, Sirs, the General matter, appearing as Yet, but as a Chaos, which is to be wrought upon. Oh! that the Good Spirit of God may now fall upon us, and carry on the Glorious work which lies before us!
This is the component of civic republicanism that modern proponents, such as Arendt, Rawls, and Skinner overlook: the positive requirement to do good. Or as Franklin summarized these ideas in his 1743 A PROPOSAL for Promoting USEFUL KNOWLEDGE among the British Plantations in America (pdf), the aim of a citizens is to “Ease” the condition of their fellow human beings, “and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts and improve the common Stock of Knowledge.”]
(Anti)Republican Party debt charade
What the Debt Limit Fight Is Actually About
Jon Schwarz [The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 5-8-2023]
Why the Debt-Ceiling is Unconstitutional
Laurence Tribe [New York Times, via The Big Picture 5-12-2023]
The president should remind Congress and the nation, “I’m bound by my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts for the first time in our entire history.” Above all, the president should say with clarity, “My duty faithfully to execute the laws extends to all the spending laws Congress has enacted, laws that bind whoever sits in this office — laws that Congress enacted without worrying about the statute capping the amount we can borrow.”
This Is What Would Happen if Biden Ignores the Debt Ceiling and Calls McCarthy’s Bluff
Robert Hockett, May 9, 2023 [New York Times]
Finally, even the serious prospect of U.S. default would quickly raise debt-servicing costs, rendering our deficit larger than it currently is — a consequence dramatically at odds with Republicans’ professed concerns about tying the debt ceiling hike to massive budget cuts.
It almost makes you think that fiscal responsibility isn’t what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s caucus really wants….
But only the beginnings. The president’s multiple arguments would be compelling, and the markets, in any case, are already pricing in worries of this sort. The prospect of an end to the too-often threatened fiscal terrorism that is debt ceiling gamesmanship, moreover, would surely be more welcome to the markets than would be continued hostage taking and associated uncertainty of the kind that Republicans now regularly impose on the nation and its creditors….
Will invoking the 14th Amendment amount to a constitutional crisis, as Ms. Yellen suggested this week? Not really. For one thing, as noted above, there are multiple grounds upon which Republican hostage taking on the debt ceiling is contrary to law, and not all of them implicate the Constitution. For another thing — and, in my view, yet more important — the present issue is not really a legal issue pitting the president against Congress.
The current debt ceiling nonsense is a case of one faction of Congress being pitted against Congress itself. Our legally contracted debt is congressionally legislated debt; refusal to pay on this debt boils down to the House Republican faction refusing to pay what Congress itself has mandated we pay.
[TW: Surprisingly, the Cato Institute is in general agreement: ]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
As various folks have quipped the safest place to hide a body is on the second page of Google search results, because no one goes there.
Google is about to role out its “AI” for search (I’ll be saying AI in quotes as policy when referring to neural nets because they aren’t intelligent) and if it stays as it is it’s going to destroy most sites that provide information or analysis. (I’ll feel some hit, but will survive as I have my own audience.)
Seeing it displayed, seeing the real estate it swallows up – being top five in results, even first, becomes utterly meaningless. It's wild. The biggest shift for the internet in decades. pic.twitter.com/9eBqcl32lP
— Alex Donaldson (@APZonerunner) May 10, 2023
That screen-shot is the kicker. It takes up too much of the page. Worst, people don’t like to click, so if Google presents the info they want, they’ll just stay on Google.
Now, of course, Google is summarizing data that the neural net has scraped from the Web, much like when you used to read some books then summarize them for your term paper. None of the information Google’s “AI” will present in answer to questions is information from Google, it’s scraped, swallowed and regurgitated from the websites which won’t be getting the traffic any more, who will then die. The perfect parasite.
There’s going to be lawsuits, and I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that just as if you do your research and re-write to summarize this probably doesn’t fall under current copyright law. That law is entirely reasonable, for people, but for neural nets it seems like a huge gap, but without a change in the law, it seems unlikely there’s a legal remedy.
I’m thinking about this. I may decide to keep most of my site off search engines (which is a problem in the sense that I use search engines to find my own articles, I’ve written so many).
But in the larger sense “AI” is a giant parasite (well, Google won’t be the only one) devouring other people’s expertise and denying them a living. Google controls about 45% of the internet ad market already with most of the rest divided up between various social median giants, and doing so destroyed a vast swathe of sites. Now they are set to kill much of what remains.
Tacitus’s line, supposedly quoting Calgacus, about the Roman Empire, was that the Romans “made a desert and called it peace”, Google and “AI” is making an internet wasteland and calling it profits.
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Europe lives in a delusion:
The German foreign minister told his Chinese counterpart: neutrality in the Ukraine war means taking Russia's side and will cause more pressure on Beijing. We must make it clear that we are with the victim. pic.twitter.com/bXPn3lP8BI
— Spriter (@Spriter99880) May 9, 2023
What Europe thinks about China matters little. China needs Russia, which supplies food, fuel and minerals far more than it needs Europe. Further, Europe cannot be a reliable partner to China, because European countries are American satrapies. They don’t actually have independent foreign policy if the US puts pressure on, and the Ukraine war has tied them far closer to America. At the same time Europe is losing chunks of its industrial base to America due to increased input costs due to the cut-off from Russian resources.
Europe is an important trading partner for China, particular a buyer of Chinese exports, but the lesson of Russia/Ukraine is that such ties are not reliable. As the US puts more and more sanctions on China (who has invaded nobody) and Europe cooperates such ties become clear sunk costs: nice to have, but nothing to count on.
The US is treating China as its main threat, and girding for war, while trying to “friend-shore” industry away from China. They are arming Taiwan, and sending senior politicians to Taiwan. Sanctions proliferate. Europe does not stand against this.
So, Europe cannot be relied on, they cooperated with sanctions even before the Ukraine war. Russia, on the other hand, can be relied on because they need China as much or more than China needs them.
Further, the reason the US hasn’t gone full trade war with China is simple: the results for America would be disastrous. Many important items are now made entirely or predominantly in China. China would hurt from losing its second biggest customer (after ASEAN) but the US would be crippled overnight. This applies as well to the EU. Shipping basic industry to someone you then decide to treat as an enemy is like handing someone your gun, then saying “I hate you and I want to kill you.”
Not smart.
China has the US and Europe over a barrel. Decoupling is not possible right now without catastrophe. Either the decoupling efforts succeed over a period of years (ten to fifteen at a minimum) or they don’t work, but China either gets time or if decoupling happens before that, it starts with the advantage of actually having physical plant and with its enemies crippled.
But Europe will have no real sway with China for as long as it is clearly a bunch of American vassal states. There is no way to make a deal with Europe which will be kept, because Europe does not have autonomy. Everyone knows that if America shoves hard, the Europeans will side with the US.
In any case, China has become the world’s premier auto exporter. Its first commercial jets are now rolling out. It is catching up in semiconductor manufacture. It is expanding trade with Africa and South America and now trades more than the US or Europe on both continents. It has made friends with both Iran and Saudi Arabia. Europe is losing exports and losing its technological advantage. Soon there Europe will mostly a customer, not a necessary supplier and in any case Europe, cooperating with American sanctions on China has already shown it is not a reliable supplier.
Given all this, European politicians, acting as if it is still 1970 or 2000, can croak and threaten and scold all they want. More sanctions are coming, China needs Russia and if China abandoned Russia, Europe would not be a reliable ally anyway.
This being the case, the odds of China abandoning Russia are essentially zero.
As for the Europeans, they need to understand that if they act as American vassals they will be treated as American vassals, which means no one who the US considers an enemy, and the US definitely considers China an enemy, can ever trust any deal with them.
Europe has made its bed. It had chances over the last twenty years to become its own power bloc, to declare itself free of American domination. It chose not to. It rises and falls with America, except that America has already shown it will cannibalize European industry and concerns whenever there is benefit to America.This is not the post-war “shared prosperity” period for the Western powers, it is dog-eat-dog and Europeans are living in a fantasy world. Even within Europe nations are acting against group interest.
The European garden is set to be filled with weeds and Europeans need to figure out a way to do more than manage decline. They might start by realizing that their interests and America’s interests are significantly different, and they might wish to stop with the ridiculous sanctimonious speeches to the Chinese. The Chinese are not abandoning a reliable ally who provides what they can’t make themselves for a few more years of not-very good relations with a Europe who obeys their enemy.
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One of the defining features of our civilization is that we deny what we don’t want to believe is true if it’s inconvenient to us.
Covid has been the most recent example, with the World Health Organization (WHO) taking two years to admit that it was an airborne virus, insisting it spread thru droplets. I daresay that refusal to admit reality cost a couple million people their lives.
Back in the 2000’s a number of us warned about the housing/sub-prime bubble for years. (A correspondent said he found 42 people who publicly predicted the crash.) It was obvious just from looking at charts, it was classic bubble formation.
I made two predictions about the market. The first was for late 2005. I based that on the supposition that the Federal Reserve, looking at the chart, would act. It was the last moment to do so. But the Federal Reserve believed there was no bubble, because markets are efficient, so they did nothing.
Reality denial.
It was one of my first lessons in “our elites are incompetent” (also venal and evil).
I then predicted October of 2007 about a year in advance and got that one right. A friend of mine who knows far more about economics thought it would be later, because the Fed would hold it off till after the election to help Bush. I disagreed, he thought they were still competent.
So, denial of reality and incompetence.
The grand-daddy of reality denial in the modern era is, of course, climate change. We’ve known about it for a long time, one friend has traced elite knowledge back to the 50s, and I can assure you that by the 70s and 80s knowledge was widespread and there was real alarm.
We did…. nothing, while pretending we were.
Recently WHO has said there is no longer a Covid emergency. I actually have some sympathy for what they’re saying: we’ve decided to just let it continue, and there’s evidence there are less deaths, and since no one is treating it as an emergency I suppose the emergency is over.
But we refuse to deal with the fact that it’s causing Long Covid and that repeated infections do damage to the brain, cardiovascular system and immune system, often non-symptomatic to start and that excess deaths are still highly elevated in most countries.
We’ve basically decided to ignore a mass crippling event. We can’t even be bothered to put filters in classrooms and other public areas, and hospitals are stopping mandating masks and most don’t have air filtration. (If you we won’t even put air filtration in hospitals and schools we clearly don’t give a fuck.)
And, of course, new variants emerge and there’s no reason to assume none of them will have an increase in lethality. The most recent “Arcturus” variant, while not more lethal appears far more infectious than previous variants, which were already in the running for the most virulent diseases in history.
We sort of acknowledge it exists, with a massive denialist cohort, the sort who keep insisting it’s just as bad as the flu, and then we do, effectively, nothing, after an initial, completely incompetent series of measures in the first year and a half, which because of their incompetence, discredited intervention. (Remember that 2 years of WHO claiming that Covid wasn’t airborne.)
There are plenty of other examples. I remember writing back in 2009 that if things continued as they were Americans would lose their abortion rights. I was pilloried for it. Similarly when Obama got rid of Dean at the DNC I said it was the end of the 50 state policy, and again I was savagely attacked for it, including both pushback from the White House and by commenters at FDL and Daily Kos.
Then there was all the pretense that Afghanistan could be won, or the 72% of Americans who thought that Iraq had WMD. (Well they did have some chemical weapons, but that’s not what anyone meant.)
That China is the largest economy in the world in the ways that matter is another thing most people are still in denial about, along with the fact that America is losing its tech lead.
I suppose you could say “well Ian, we admit reality and then do nothing” but actions are what count, and based on actions we’re in complete denial about our major problems, and when denial is still even remotely possible, we continue with it. I can’t count the number of people I run into who are still climate-change denialists, even as we have wildfires and every week leads to some decades old temperature record being broken.
This era is right up there with the last decades of the Western Roman Empire for stupidity and incompetence. The difference is that the scale is global and the problems are bigger than barbarian invasions.
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