Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Ian Welsh Page 147 of 437

The Covid Idiot Shuffle

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On August 5, 2021

193 Comments

This is from the province of Ontario, in Canada where I live.

I’m going to enlarge and show the first graph properly:

Now what you’re going to notice is that Rt never went below about 80—that is 80 new cases per 100 Covid cases. Also, the general trend is UP. So you have a situation through stage one where case counts are gong down, but R is stubbornly high, even if not over 1. Then in stage 2 it actually burps over 1 and Ontario goes to stage 3 anyway.

Now, I know of a guy who lives in a rooming house (not me) who got Covid. He did the right thing: got tested, obeyed quarantine. Health authorities knew and followed up with him.

Great, but the problem is he lived in a rooming house. Not just him but everyone in the house should have been quarantined, and both is and there contacts needed to be traced (and ideally quarantined.) Nobody else in the house was even contacted. Ideally he should have been quarantined somewhere else than the house, probably everyone in the house (all exposed) should have been, since any rooming  house is a great place for Covid to spread.

There is no effective track and trace or quarantine in Ontario. There just isn’t. So  you don’t get below .8, and you don’t control spread, so every time Ontario reopens it is just a matter of time before the next wave.

Lockdowns and partial closures do not work without proper track and trace and quarantine. When a new outbreak is seen it has to be jumped on.

Of course, if you want poor people (like those who live in rooming houses) to obey the quarantine, you’re going to have to make up their wages while they’re stuck in quarantine, and you have to deliver food and other necessities. This is what effective quarantine regimes in other countries do: they make sure the quarantined are taken care of. It may be boring to be stuck at home, but they aren’t going to fall behind on the rent, or not be able to eat. (These poor people also tend to be the “essential workers” everyone praises then let’s die.)

This half-assing of dealing with Covid has been typical of most of the western world. There’s a refusal among elites to actually deal with Covid as a serious threat, and mobilize government and private resources (seize them, if necessary, yes it’s legal) to ensure that Covid is properly dealt with.

I’ve suggested and believe it’s because Covid has made rich people much richer in the West, but whatever it is, it’s killing and crippling a lot of people. About 15 to 25% of people who get even a mild case of Covid get long Covid, with a variety of nasty symptoms and we’re now seeing indications of some mental damage from Covid separate from long Covid.

You really, really don’t want to catch this shit.

Failure to do things right is mass murder by those with the authority to do things right. Premier Doug Ford, in Ontario, is an active danger to everyone in Ontario because he refuses to run the play that will actually get Covid (mostly) under control. Everyone who dies now or in the past almost year is  his fault. He is a mass murderer because the consequences of his decisions are obvious. He’s also crippling a hell of a lot of people.

Ontario isn’t unique, obviously, this is the typical play in almost all Western countries.

It is compounded by the point-blank refusal to do everything possible to ramp up  vaccine production as fast as possible and help other countries in every way. Every country where Covid isn’t under control is a place where it can mutate into a worse strain. Delta is WAY worse than original Covid and Delta is unlikely to be the last bad variant.

For decades the fact that our “masters” were incompetent psychopaths didn’t seem to matter all that much; sure some people were getting hurt, but it wasn’t you, right? And if it was, well you lost your power and money so  you didn’t matter and couldn’t do anything.

Now it’s you or grandmother or you kid getting a protentially life-long disability.

You replace your elites, by whatever method will work, or they will keep killing and crippling you.

Doug Ford, by any rational calculus is an ongoing threat to everyone in Ontario, including me. His actions and lack of actions stand a damn good chance of killing or crippling me and anyone I know in Ontario.

This is probably true of whoever the leaders are where you live.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

When The “Communists” Do The Right Things

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On August 4, 2021

47 Comments

So, Xi Xingping, has, recently:

  1. Made all tutoring companies become non-profits as part of an attempt to reduce burdens on the middle class students and their parents: they had to spend vast time and money hiring tutors for competitive exams;
  2. Forced food delivery companies to pay couriers a living wage;
  3. Taken actions to reduce housing prices, so ordinary Chinese can afford them;
  4. Has stated that ride-sharing firms (stupid name for them) are stifling competition, suggesting action is coming
  5. (Shut down bitcoin mining.)

Xi’s priorities, “ahead of growth”, are apparently:

  • National security, which includes control of data and greater self-reliance in technology
  • Common prosperity, which aims to curb inequalities that have soared in recent decades
  • Stability, which means tamping down discontent among China’s middle class 

A lot of international investors have been burned by this, including property investors and those invested in the tech sector (which Xi has been after in particular.)

What passes for a lot of tech “innovation” these days are things like centralized apps for rides, which in countries with labor laws actually just suppress wages and ignore laws or bottleneck companies, as when someone gets a bottleneck position in an app store (Apple is having a big court fight over their 30% rates and approval process) or a market with strong network affects like social networks or Search (Google)

Such “innovations” aren’t really, they’re ways for a few people to take a larger percentage of profits or pass thru funds and leave less for everyone else. Facebook does great; news sites die. Google does great, but strangles internet content creators (who did far better in the early to mid 00s before Google got a stranglehold.)

Xi’s basically right to clamp down on this stuff, and to stop people from making excess profits on actions, like tutoring, that don’t add social value. Tutoring is Red Queen’s Race stuff, and people who can afford more or better tutoring win: that creates social discontent, while providing no actual value to society as a whole. In fact, by creating all the anger and resentment it is damaging society.

A lot of this is also happening because Xi and the Communist Party have given up on being friends with America. They now regard a cold war / clash-of-civilizations as inevitable, and are no willing to play by neoliberal rules and make sure that a chunk of Western elites can also get rich from China’s economy.

In geopolitical terms this may be a mistake, the fewer American and Western elites who are making money off the Chinese economy, the more likely even worse trade war and the sooner Cold War 2.0 happens.

But it’s also understandable. The actions against Huawei, when it took the global lead in 5th gen wireless, then the export ban on microchips made it clear to Beijing that the US was their enemy and was going to use its power to make sure China didn’t take dominance in any hi-tech fields. Since not becoming a leading tech power (remember, internet companies that simply intermediate and chips/phones are very different) means never breaking out of the middle income trap or truly being a first rank great power, that’s unacceptable to Xi.

Overall I think Xi’s been a bad leader for China. He’s fumbled foreign affairs. As a friend pointed out to me, America doesn’t treat its allies and third parties well at all. They should be falling over themselves to align with China, but they aren’t, because China has often been very aggressive and bullying to smaller nations.

This is part of Chinese geopolitical think: small nations should know their place; so should weak ones. When China was weak, it kept quiet and built up, now that it isn’t, it expects deference.

But less bullying would have led to a lot more friends. Few nations actually like America, but a lot are scared of China too.

We’ll talk more about China and the US. This cleavage is probably the most important geopolitical event necessary to understand what’s going to happen over the next twenty years. It’s not as important as climate change and environmental collapse, but almost nothing else is more important.

In a sense it’s almost comforting: the rising great power challenging the old great power and their alliance. Traditional.

But it can still destroy a lot of lives, or, if handled skillfully, leave a lot of people better off. For many, how they maneuver around the giants and the midgets who are their allies will be one of the most important decisions they make; for others simply understanding how the world will change as a result will let them make better choices.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

And The Mass Evictions are ON

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On August 2, 2021

44 Comments

So, the evictions moratorium expired Saturday at midnight.

Over a quarter of renters are behind in some states, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities think-tank.

Southern states are some of the worst affected, though some 16 percent of US households owed rent — about double the amount before the pandemic.

This wasn’t necessary, but the choice was made to not pay people to stay in place, and the money given for relief has mostly not been administered, presumably because the bureaucratic hoops are ridiculous.

only $3 billion in aid has reached households out of the $25 billion allotted to states and localities in early February.

Rental properties and single homes are being snapped up en-masse by private equity and other big investors. Eviction is in their interest, as it makes it easier to raise rent.

This is a watershed moment for real-estate in America: this is where it moves to being owned more by smaller landlords and individual owners (for homes) to just another corporate owned means of, well, rent extraction.

Remember that after 2008 banks deliberately held houses off the market to drive up prices, and you’ll understand what is going to happen to rent, which has already seen ridiculous rises. With large amounts of rental property now in a very few hands, it will be easy for a few people to decide to hold just enough properties off the market to drive up rents. It’s better for big institutional owners to have higher rent prices and some empty if that works out to more rent, and given shortages already exist, I’m betting that will be the case.

The era of cheap housing has been over for a while, but it’s going to be thrown in a coffin and staked thru the heart if big investors have their way.

We’ll talk more later this week, probably, about how wonderful and useful the homeless are and why they are treated so badly.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Open Thread

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On July 31, 2021

80 Comments

Use comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

A Brief Note On Afghanistan And The Taliban

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On July 30, 2021

41 Comments

I can’t find it now, but in the brief period between 9/11 and the American invasion of Afghanistan, I read an interview with the Afghan (Taliban) ambassador to Pakistan. He said, paraphrasing:

The Americans will invade. They will capture the cities. We will retreat to the country and fight a guerilla war, and in the end they will leave, and we will reconquer the cities.

At the time I knew he was right, and the last phases of his prediction are now bearing fruit.

I don’t like the Taliban, ideologically they’re my enemies, as are all fundamentalists, but they brought an end to rapine, pillaging and torture at the cost of fundamentalist religious law and repression, and it was an improvement over the previous situation.

Those who don’t like the Taliban should remember that if America had not supported religious fundamentalists against the Soviets, there very likely would be no Taliban or Al-Q’aeda, 9/11 wouldn’t have happened, either, nor ISIS, etc, etc… In the 60s and 70s women could walk down the streets in most Afghan cities in a skirt and be safe; they went to university, got degrees and had jobs.

Blowback is real. A lot of Afghans wanted to be secular and modern, but the war between the USSR and the US mattered more, and so that dream died. Pakistani secularism also died at the same time and for largely the same reason, and the encouragement, by the US, of the Saudis, to spread their particularly vile and intolerant branch of Islam had poisoned the world to this day.

Anyway, the Taliban will rule most of the country again, because whether you like it or not, they are the natural rulers right now and if you don’t like that, remember that the US did as much as it could to make it that way and everyone with two neurons firing together knew that the US could not “conquer and hold” Afghanistan, nor could it “nation build.” (Nor did it ever intend to nation build.)

Every time you think the US is “helping” another country, laugh yourself sick, because it rarely is. The last countries to truly get helped by the US were Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea. The preference and often reality, all cases, was to have a right wing government in charge, with a veneer of democracy as a facade (the South Koreans, to their credit, would not accept the facade), but in exchange those countries were really helped and allowed to industrialize or re-industrialize.

This wasn’t done out of any goodness of heart or belief in democracy, it was done to stop the spread of Communism beyond the USSR and China in a period when US elites genuinely thought they could lose the cold war. Fear, genuine fear.

But Afghanistan? No. Afghans were never more than disposable pawns and punching bags. Nothing like kicking the shit out of someone to make far too many Americans feel better and by 01 Americans had forgotten that they could only win wars when the enemy cooperated by fighting field battles, while back in the 80s Americans still remembered they couldn’t actually win against any enemy smart enough to not sit there and take it, and shouldn’t even try, so they used Afghan proxies to fight for them, while destroying any last chance of secular prosperity in Afghanistan, Pakistan and, indeed, much of the Islamic world.

We just talked about Daniel Hale, who revealed that 90% of all drone killings were of innocents.

When you think of your time in Afghanistan, keep that in mind. Your image should always be of innocents being blown away in a wedding party.

That’s America. That’s who you are. In essence it’s who you were in Vietnam. And that’s why Americans should always be on their knees, praying that God isn’t just.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Who Goes To Prison For America’s Crimes? The Whistleblowers.

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On July 29, 2021

43 Comments

There’s a joke about the CIA and torture, in that the only person who went to prison for torturing people was the guy who revealed the torture.

Daniel Hale, the guy who revealed that drone bombing killed 90% innocents, is now off to his stint in jail. He seems tough, maybe he won’t be driven to multiple suicide attempts like Manning was by the deliberate mistreatment he will surely experience..

The judge, an enforcer named Liam O’Grady, said,

“You are not being prosecuted for speaking out about the drone program killing innocent people,” O’Grady said. “You could have been a whistleblower . . . without taking any of these documents.”

Without the documents, though, there would have only been a claim, not proof. The documents are what made the “speaking out” work. O’Grady surely knows this, but his job is to put people in jail who don’t deserve to be there, and unlike Hale, his conscience, if he has one, isn’t sufficient to make him change his ways.

There is a certain irony of all this happening now that the US had admitted defeat and pulled out of Afghanistan. At least in that war, what were all those innocents killed for?

(Aside: we do all know, as we have always known, that the Taliban is the natural ruling party of Afghanistan and now that the US is gone they will rule it.)

Hale is a hero but I feel bad for him, less because of the jail sentence, though I’m sure it’ll be horrific, than because his proving that drone murders were even worse than we thought did nothing to slow or stop them, because the American people don’t care and American elites are depraved psychopaths for whom mass murder means nothing.

Unlike American elites during the Pentagon papers: also depraved psychopaths engaged in mass murder, modern American elites don’t believe the public has a right to know, or that anyone else has the right to a conscience. To be rebuked with proof, to them, is beyond the pale.

Note that Obama, the great black savior, was actually the President who really started the crackdown on whistleblowers. To a large extent Bush Jr. didn’t care much, his particular depraved indifference “who cares what you think” didn’t require people to not call him out, he just required that his will was followed and his crimes committed. Wail away, even with documents, who cares what you think?

I hope Daniel Hale comes thru this as well as can be expected. As for everyone else,  your leaders are depraved psychopaths. Don’t expect them to respond to moral reasoning, and since they despise you as weak, don’t expect them to respond to threats. They cannot be reasoned with, only removed, then prosecuted for their crimes against humanity and the world.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

A Great Idea About Capitalism That Was Wrong

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On July 27, 2021

71 Comments

So, back in the 80s, when I was young, green and wet behind the years, one of the great thinkers about how to help poor people was a guy named Hernando DeSoto. (Great name, aces on parents!)

DeSoto, who was mostly concerned with Latin and South America had one big idea: the reason that poor people were fucked is they didn’t have clear ownership of what they actually owned: slum dwellers didn’t own their houses or the land they sat on, peasants often didn’t own their land either, and informal bus companies and the like operated without licenses or any rights to their routes.

Because they had no clear title, they couldn’t borrow against their actual property, couldn’t sell it and move, or in general use it as an asset.

This DeSoto said (and at the time, I believed, and so did many governments and NGOs and so on) was one of the reasons they stayed poor, not only couldn’t they access capital: they couldn’t even use the capital they already really owned.

The solution was to give them that clear title, which would allow a million new businesses to bloom, and so on.

Because we live in a far more cynical age (and because I gave it away in the title!) you know this didn’t work out. What happened instead, though it took a couple decades to become obvious, is that once they had title, they could lose it: sell it, have the government take it away, go into debt (which most poor people do) and have it seized in payment of debt, etc…

If you’ve ever been real poor (in the informal economy, unbanked, no assets) you know that perhaps the only good thing about it is the ability tell collection agents (generally the scum of the Earth) to go fuck themselves. “Take me to court, I have nothing you can seize!)

DeSoto managed to remove that one sliver a silver lining, so that slum dwellers could even lose their tin shacks.

Ah, capitalism! Truly the most glorious system ever developed to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands while pretending that it’s all voluntary. At least when feudal nobles or MOngols conquered you and took everything you didn’t have to pretend it was your free choice, or something.

Realism aside (I was going to say snark, but this is just how the system is meant to work) this is what happens when we are indoctrinated into thinking that capitalism is a system designed uplift everyone, and it just happens to require concentration of wealth. It’s also what happens when we assume that the uplift actually powered by industrialization happened because of capitalism instead.

It’s hard to disentangle these two because capitalism was in power when industrialization happened and the great challenge against it (state centralized “communism”) lost (largely because it had the inferior geostrategic position, I’d suggest.) So we mix the two.

But they aren’t the same, and capitalism, to the extent it has virtues, works best when it is kept under strict control and a lot of things are kept out of the market.

I assume DeSoto was sincere (though who knows), but because he bought the myth, and sold his myth so well, he wound up hurting exactly the people he wanted to help.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

Rationality Is Not A Way Out Of Group Action Problems like Climate Change and Covid

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On July 26, 2021

47 Comments

One: “The system is interdependent and what I do is damaging it, but it doesn’t matter because I will die before it breaks in a way that hurts me.” This is rational. Rational thinking will not get you out of issues like climate change. Rational thought is a means, not an end.

Two: The system is interdependent and what I do is damaging it, but by doing so I am becoming more powerful, rich, or otherwise benefiting. If I was not damaging it I would not benefit as much, and might even suffer.

A lot of people worship rationality in our society. We think that rational is a synonym for “good” and that if we are rational, we will do the right thing.

This is incorrect for a variety of reasons, but it is extremely incorrect in group action problems. If 90% of society, and 95% of people born 50 years in the future will suffer because I do something, but I benefit greatly, it is entirely rational to cause that harm.

Covid has made the rich much richer, fast. Statista has a nice little graphic:

As for Climate Change, business as usual worked fine for the world’s elites. We really started paying attention to global warming in the 70s, and since then, by not just ignoring it but increasing it, they’ve done brilliant.

(The top .1% and .01% and .001% numbers have risen even faster.)

Rationality does not work for ethical decisions. It can help you determine means, “what’s the best way to do this” but it can’t determine ends.

It isn’t even that great for means. The rationalists (epitomized by Stars Slate Codex) tend towards hard utilitarianism: the most good for the most people, and sneer at virtue ethics.

Seems smart: what you want is the most good, right?

But the problem is that instrumenalism “the right thing is whatever gets you where you want to go” often doesn’t work because humans are both stupid and very good at motivated reasoning. “Well, people will obviously be better off if we tax rich people less, because rich people give jobs and they can give more jobs and pay more for them!”

Or, “if we pay people like CEOs more if they raise shareholder value, they’ll do more of the right thing!”

Or, in general terms, “people help others because of greed, not virtue, so we have to bribe them to do the right thing and micro-manage incentives.”

None of this stuff worked, of course. It never has, and it never will. The eras where you tax the rich heavily and keep executive compensation relatively low had better behaviour by executives than the post Thatcher/Reagan era. Faster economic growth, too. (Better isn’t necessarily the same thing as good.)

The problem with instrumentalist thinking, which utilitarianism tends to fall into, is that “means are ends.” If you bomb the village to save it, or invade the country, you’ve done a shit load of evil. If you lock people up in prison for victimless crimes, you’ve created victims: the people being brutalized in prison. If you let cops take people’s property without proving a crime, you’ve increased theft. If you torture, you’ve tortured. If you lower wages to increase efficiency, you’ve lowered wages. If you surveil workers to get the most out of them you know that’s bad (Bezos would never let someone else determine when he can take a shit.)

The means are always most of what we do.

We know that being greedy, or selfish, or cowardly, or sadistic are bad. We know that rape is always bad. We know that killing people is bad. We know that beating people is bad.We know that hunger is bad. We know that homelessness is terrible. We know lack of water kills. When the IMF removes food subsidies we KNOW more people will go hungry. When we sell bombs to Israel and Saudi Arabia, we know they’ll be used to murder innocents.

Instrumentalism and utilitarianism allow you to say to yourself “well, I know virtue ethics would say this is bad, but actually it’s good because it’ll lead to a better world.” Meanwhile there you are with policies that lead to the Amazon being clearcut and dumping so much CO2 and methane into the world that eventually the world’s forests just start burning down and permafrost methane starts exploding like bombs.

Virtue ethics and bars on behaviour like “no torture or rape ever” exist because we know we tend to find excuses to allow us to engage the worst parts of ourselves: to be greedy and selfish, to force others to do what we want, and to live like Kings and Queens because we exploited others. Bezos goes to space, workers in his warehouses piss into jars or wear diapers and walk around in shit before they pass out or die from heat stroke: these things are related.

Rationalism just says “how do I get what I want?” Virtue ethics and red lines say “you can’t get it by doing evil.”

This is why straight utilitarians and instrumentalists are either hypocrites or fools. Either they know that their ethics allows for monstrous behaviour and doesn’t guarantee results, or they know it produces subpar results for a lot of people, even most people, but they expect to be in the minority who benefits (which, by the way, is very rational.)

Don’t worship at the cult of rationalism or instrumentalism. Virtue ethics and red lines have their own problems, and there are reasons for being way of them too, but at the end of the day, if getting what you want requires you to hurt a lot of people, perhaps you aren’t doing it because you truly believe it’ll make the world a better place?

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

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