The future of cash

Excellent paper from the Bank of International Settlements

Corsi boxes

Cheap easy to build air cleaners

In this extremely simple, Twitter-aggregating post, I will give a little bit of the histor and cheer on the many CR box makers. I will give a number of examples of their work, allude to the difficulties of producing CR boxes internationally, and remark on mutualism. Since I assume most of you know how to make Corsi boxes, I’ll confine directions to an Appendix.

The day we surrendered to COVID

This new CDC guidance as of Feb 25, 2022, just gives up any attempt at “public health”

Now let’s consider the morality of the CDC’s new guidance, whether it’s based on science, whether it’s dangerous to the public, and its effect on masking as a public health tool.

Short answers, no, yes, poor…

Ed Yong  discusses why American society seems to be accepting of inevitability of thousands of additional COVID deaths.

many aspects of the pandemic work against a social reckoning. The threat—a virus—is invisible, and the damage it inflicts is hidden from public view. With no lapping floodwaters or smoking buildings, the tragedy becomes contestable to a degree that a natural disaster or terrorist attack cannot be. Meanwhile, many of those who witnessed COVID’s ruin are in no position to discuss it.

March 8 from Eric Topol

The Epidemic of Covid Complacency

Isn’t it great? The pandemic is over. We don’t need masks. The virus is contained. Forget about vaccines since they don’t work. The vulnerable are protected. Future variants will be benign. 

The only problem is that none of this is true. Any proclamation that the pandemic is over ignores the potential recrudescence of a new variant with high transmission and immune escape. We will still benefit from using masks for many situations including protecting immunocompromised and vulnerable people, which also includes nearly 100 million Americans who haven’t been vaccinated, many without infection-acquired immunity. We are still averaging nearly 50,000 confirmed new cases a day, at a time when rapid tests are increasingly being used and not factored in. This is more than 3-fold the level of new cases, and 2-fold the number of Covid hospitalizations, than in June 2021. The metrics do not lend any support to the mission of containment accomplished.

Revisiting Paul Farmer’s prediction

That we will just resign ourselves 

Last month, Paul Farmer died…. 

In public health, we have what we call the social determinants of health, that drive sickness and death—forces and policies that create the health disparities we know all too well in the US and around the globe.

Paul borrowed the term “structural violence” from the Swedish sociologist Johan Galtung to define these determinants in an altogether different manner, as “social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people (typically, not those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities).

April of last year:

Those whose lives are rarely touched by structural violence are uniquely prone to recommend resignation as a response to it.… Since the beginning of this pandemic, we’ve been mired in a sort of magical thinking about how it will end. Just because smallpox and bubonic plague no longer terrify us, this new pandemic too is sure to blow over and disappear without us exerting ourselves in new ways beyond the development of new vaccines.… But in settings in which all of us are at risk, as is sometimes true of contagion shared through the air we breathe, we must also contemplate containment nihilism—the attitude that preventing contagion simply isn’t worth it. There are a myriad of ways in which structural violence is entrenched, and these forms of resignation had devastating effects on the United States…

There is no “we”…. otherwise I might say that we are totally screwed.  But it’s everyone for himself.  And other people can put us at risk without our consent.

Financialization is not good

nice post

too much financialization is a drag on growth

Financial services should be boring and low cost, and where they get government subsidies via explicit or de facto guarantees (often!) they should be regulated as utilities. Otherwise, they become vehicles for rentierism and wasteful allocation of resources. For instance, as Michael Hudson pointed out, classical economist backed usury ceilings; otherwise, one of the most lucrative borrower groups were rich gamblers, who hardly deserved to have their habits supported at the expense of productive industry.

Bleak forecast re long COVID

Where COVID is going

Why isn’t the pandemic over yet?  Why did we require boosters?  Authorities including the CDC are finally acknowledging that our vaccines provide protection for only 3-4 months at a time.

This is part of a lecture series by

@masks4canada

, to chart future directions of this pandemic. What can we do to change course, or at least ameliorate ill effects? Many of our political leaders want this to be over now, is this realistic?

continuing dysfunction in T-cells In Long Covid patients

overreaction; T-cells start killing healthy cells and each other, and you start depleting them, including your naive T-cells. Naive T-cells are a pool of cells that your body creates when you’re a child to handle future infections.

When these get depleted, it ages your immune system and likely leaves you open to future infections or cancers. Low naive T-cells are associated with poor outcomes

Who decides who votes?

From BOLTS

This database focuses on who oversees the conduct of the election, from the voter registration process to the casting and processing of ballots. The tabulation, canvassing, and certification of results is often conducted in a separate process that may or may not involve the same administrators. 

Monopoly power discussed

from WBUR Boston

 a week-long exploration of the hidden power of monopolies in the U.S., and the evolution of antitrust law over the past 200 years. The On Point series considers whether the country's view on monopolies — and its influence on democracy — is poised for a major change.

Misinformation

Is substantially driven by mainstream media “

Sirota

The difference between “media” and actual journalism is the root of the misinformation crisis. We’re drowning in content that is increasingly valued only for its potency in the political wars, rather than judged on its factual merits and its choice of targets. That kind of media content strays farther and farther from reality because it’s about entertaining and inflaming rather than educating and informing.

Recap of Biden approach to COVID

Feldman

How did we get in a situation where a Democratic president — who ran, in part, against Trump’s horrid pandemic response — is letting the virus rip? How did we get to a point where a key organizer of the Great Barrington Declaration, a right-wing libertarian campaign opposed to public health measures, has stated that Republican and Democratic states alike have adopted policies in line with their philosophy? As hospitals fill up around the country, why are political leaders doing nothing to at least try to ‘flatten the curve’?

The Biden administration, I argue, made a strategic decision to prepare for one specific pandemic scenario. In that scenario, high levels of disease and death would continue in early 2021, followed by widespread population immunity from both vaccination and prior infection. This population immunity would lower the death toll to manageable, ignorable levels, like that of seasonal flu.

Biden’s advisors chose a narrow path of pharmaceutical intervention because they saw the politics of a comprehensive public health response as a losing proposition. The White House did not want the pandemic to define Biden’s presidency. The virus, however, had other plans.

public health’s response to the decline   

From 2014, about the aftermath of the financial crisis, but still relevant 

Short answer, “Serve the 1%”

American institutions are in decline and rife with corruption brought on by a combination of hitting the limits to growth while under the control of neoliberal capitalism[i]. To the extent one deviates from the appearance and demeanor of staid white middle or upper class norms, an encounter with the police in many localities[ii],[iii],[iv] can be dangerous to ones person and pocket[v]. The government’s reaction to the “the most destructive epidemics of elite financial frauds in history”[vi] has been to further enrich[vii] –rather than jail- financiers,[viii] and protection of the banks continues to harm and ruin the lives of millions of citizens. 

On neoliberalism

Some readings and thoughts gathered from the naked capitalism community 

Neoliberalism: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name by Philip Mirowski 

“Neoliberalism is a political doctrine depending upon a strong state to pursue the disenchantment of politics by means of economics. – Will Davies

Neoliberalism themes:
(1) “Free” markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through political organizing.

(2) “The market” is an information processor, and the most efficient one possible—more efficient than any government or any single human ever could be. Truth can only be validated by the market.

(3) Market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of humankind.

(4) The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state, but to take control of it, and to redefine its structure and function, in order to create and maintain the market-friendly culture.

(5) There is no contradiction between public/politics/citizen and private/market/entrepreneur-consumer—because the lat­ter does and should eclipse the former.

(6) The most important virtue—more important than justice, or anything else—is freedom, defined “negatively” as “freedom to choose,” and most importantly, defined as the freedom to acquiesce to the imperatives of the market.

(7) Capital has a natural right to flow freely across national boundaries.

(8) Inequality—of resources, income, wealth, and even political rights—is a good thing; it prompts productivity, because people envy the rich and emulate them; people who complain about inequality are either sore losers or old fogies, who need to get hip to the way things work nowadays.

(9) Corporations can do no wrong—by definition. Competition will take care of all problems, including any tendency to monopoly.

(10) The market, engineered and promoted by neoliberal experts, can always provide solutions to problems seemingly caused by the market in the first place: there’s always “an app for that.”

(11) There is no difference between is and should be: “free” markets both should be (normatively) and are(positively) the most efficient economic system, and the most just way of doing politics, and the most empirically true description of human behavior, and the most ethical and moral way to live—which in turn explains, and justifies, why their versions of “free” markets should be and, as neoliberals build more and more power, increasingly are universal.12

Neoliberalism: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/neoliberalism-movement-dare-not-speak-name/
And a longer article Hell is Truth Seen Too Late https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Mirowski-Hell-is-Truth-Seen-Too-Late.pdf

Reply ↓

1. Lambert StretherFebruary 17, 2022 at 3:49 am

   The above forgets Rule #2 :-). Which is important.

   Adding, Mirowski is the author of The Road from Mont Pèlerin: the making of the neoliberal thought collective, another goddamned book I have to read.

Risks of long COVID

Don Ford explains

 the name ‘Long COVID’ is a bit deceptive in that it makes folks think it’s simply the COVID acute infection period stretching out longer but that’s not entirely accurate

Some identified symptoms 

Meta study on NPIs

Non pharmaceutical interventions, e.g. masks and lockdowns, are tools in the fight against viruses 

Controversy exists about effectiveness 

Here is 

a review of 51 studies

Bottom line, pretty clearly effective 

Is intelligent life rare

in the universe

We know it’s rare on earth…

Tamara Davis and I argued that one could estimate the probability of abiogenesis on other planets based on how rapidly it occurred on earth.4 The more rapidly on earth, the more probable elsewhere. Snyder-Beattie et al. use the same reasoning to connect the rapidity of a series of evolutionary transitions on earth to the probability of analogous transitions elsewhere. To better understand this approach, consider the following example. Suppose that you are a corvid ornithologist and that you have designed a range of puzzles for crows to solve.5 Some of the puzzles are easy; some are hard; and some are near impossible—but the difficulty of each puzzle is unknown. An experiment is then designed to determine the difficulty of all the puzzles. The amount of time taken to solve each puzzle and the number of puzzles solved is tracked carefully. If this process is repeated multiple times and the crow solves many puzzles quickly, it follows that the puzzles are easy. The puzzles solved quickest are the easiest, and, therefore, crows that can solve them should be commonplace. The puzzles that take the most time to solve are the hardest, and crows that can solve them rarer.

… analogous to our status on earth. We have been solving evolutionary puzzles for four billion years. Current modeling suggests that the habitable lifetime of the earth will come to an end in about one billion years, mostly due to the increasing luminosity of the sun and the resultant loss of water.6 The total habitable lifetime of the earth is therefore approximately five billion years. Our current situation is akin to that of the crow 40 minutes into a 50-minute experiment. We have 10 minutes left. The major transitions in the evolution of our lineage are the puzzles we have already solved.7

In this comparison, the emergence of life on earth would have taken place near the beginning of the 50-minute experiment. We solved that puzzle quickly. From this result we can infer that the emergence of life should be common in the universe. At the 40-minute mark in the experiment, we find that our human-like intelligence evolved only about a second ago. The fact that it took so long suggests that human-like intelligence is difficult to evolve and uncommon.8 This is the basic reasoning behind Snyder-Beattie et al.’s conclusion that intelligent life in the universe is rare.

Tribalism may be fundamental

Human nature

tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition and that no group—not even one’s own—is immune.