Ian Welsh

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

Author: Ian Welsh Page 94 of 437

As Long Covid Increases Expect Government Policy To Rush Death

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On May 18, 2023

14 Comments

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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China Has A Huge Lead In Patents

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On May 16, 2023

6 Comments

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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Open Thread

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On May 13, 2023

12 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Google Neural Net “AI” Is About To Destroy Half The Independent Web

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On May 11, 2023

22 Comments

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.)

https://twitter.com/APZonerunner/status/1656384261249703938

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 Needs To Re-evaluate Its Importance And Its American Vassalization

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On May 10, 2023

22 Comments

Europe lives in a delusion:

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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Denial Of Reality

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On May 9, 2023

25 Comments

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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Open Thread

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On May 6, 2023

5 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Are Police In San Francisco Too Lazy To Work, Too Scared, Or Just Incompetent

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On May 5, 2023

19 Comments

Stumbled across this interesting rabbit hole on twitter.

Brian Kirschner did the math in constant 2019 numbers:

And, on traffic citations:

So, this interesting. There’s been a general collapse in clearance rates across the country, but when you look at them in detail you tend to see that police have basically stopped trying to clear crimes against blacks, and concentrate on crimes against whites.

But SFPD looks like more than that, it looks like refusal to work.

It’s an interesting situation. Part of it, I’m quite sure, is the way that police are trained to be scared. David Grossman (I’ve read his book “On Combat”) is famous for insisting that training must create instinctive killers who react without conscious thought. Police training is full of exercises which make cops scared of the public.

Indeed…

…officers are afraid of being injured or killed because their jobs are dangerous, but data show that being a police officer is relatively safe. Law enforcement doesn’t crack the top-15 list of most dangerous jobs in America, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

…“A lot of research shows that what people think is dangerous and what they believe poses the greatest risk of harm is determined by your membership in various social groups,” Arsiniega says. This is a phenomenon called “social amplification.” Police may believe they are at a great risk of civilian assault, even when empirical data say otherwise…

…

Mixing systemic racism and socially amplified fear of assault becomes deadly because police are armed, and they have “legal justification to kill people and be legally excused if they’re protecting their lives or lives of a third party,” Arsiniega says.

However, in more than 90 percent of cases in which an officer kills a civilian – about 1,000 each year in America – officers claim to be protecting themselves, not a third party.

Neither do the majority of injuries to on-duty officers come from civilians.

For her dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley, Arsiniega studied police officer injury data from all causes in Savannah, Georgia, between 2010 and 2018. Only 11 percent of all officer injuries were the result of civilian assaults.

She also studied assaults on Atlanta Police Department officers from 2015 to 2018 using reports written by officers themselves. Despite having a violent crime rate roughly 2.5-times the national average, not a single officer was shot or stabbed in the years of her sample. The most serious injuries caused by civilians were broken bones in the hand and cuts and scrapes on officers’ hands and knees while arresting suspects.

Cops are basically immune to prosecution for violent crimes against civilians. There are exceptions, but they’re exceptions. They aren’t actually doing a particularly dangerous job: being a logger or a fisherman is way more dangerous, but they think they are, and they have an ethos of “us versus them.”

But their training emphasizes that is “better to be judged by twelve, than carried by six”. They are more concerned about their safety than the safety of others, they don’t “protect and serve” civilians, they protect and serve themselves.

This feeling of being a beleaguered group, under great danger, probably contributes to refusal to work. They show up, but they don’t take anything they perceive as risks.

There is also a sense that they aren’t appreciated, a “we risk our lives and you look down on us and don’t treat us like heroes” and that also, I’m sure contributes to a sense that they don’t owe it to the public to do their jobs. After all, money isn’t worth their lives.

But basically, being a cop is close to being a sinecure at this point. They are mostly immune to prosecution, they are paid very well for municipal workers, and police budgets in most cities keep rising and are often the largest part of the city budget. It’s a union job in the worst sense of the word: a job where there is no real accountability to actually do the job, and it is cushioned by the high respect that most white Americans have in the police.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans trust local police and law enforcement to promote justice and equal treatment for people of all races (up from 56%), and 52% feel the same about police unions (up from 40%).

Since clearance rates have been declining for decades and since the response to that has been to increase budgets, there really is no reason for police to do their jobs. In fact, not doing their jobs is probably the strategy that works best: it’s easier, they get to say crime is out of control and claim that more money is needed.

If not doing your job leads to more money not less, why do your job, especially when you’ve been trained to think it’s a dangerous job, when being a policeman isn’t even as dangerous as being a farmer, logger, or fisherman.

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