Ian Welsh

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

Month: February 2021 Page 2 of 3

Rush Limbaugh Escapes The Hell-World He Created

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On February 17, 2021

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Stirling Newberry explained the concept of a death bet: you bet that the negative consequences of your actions will occur after you are dead. Classically this explains climate change: decision makers who could have stopped it will almost all be dead before it becomes significant.

Rush Limbaugh was one of the most important people in creating the modern right; driving deregulation and spreading hate and racism. It’s impossible to overstate how influential he was in the 90s, not just thru his own radio show, but because other radio hosts copied him. Radio was a BIG deal back then still, and had massive reach.

There aren’t ten people more responsible for America being what it is today than Limbaugh; there may not be five. (Robert Ailes, who ran Fox, is on the list too.)

All of these people died before they suffered from making the US a non-fuctional undeveloping nation. They were protected by their wealth and their power. Limbaugh died rich. Ailes died rich.

Meanwhile, in Texas, utilities deregulation and privatization has lead to vast suffering and death, which, yes, anyone with sense who wasn’t blinded by greed or the world’s stupidest ideology (if we give a lot of money to rich people that’ll be good for us!) knew would happen eventually.

America is divided into two tribes who hate each other. Eliminationist rhetoric is common. The media fans the flames, regularly lying and dividing people against each other.

Limbaugh. His legacy. What he worked hard for all his life. What made him rich. Hate, stupidity and the destruction of his country.

Limbaugh won. He’s dead, he never suffered the consequences of his belief.

But many of you, dear readers, will.

Men like Limbaugh at the enemies of all good people; all decent people. So are those who funded him and pushed him. So is every Texas utility executive; every member of the board, and every single politician who pushed deregulation, privatization and policies which increased climate change.

They sold your future; your lives; your children’s lives, so they could live well and be rich. This includes Pelosi and Biden, both of whom were very important in creating this world.

They’re going to die, never having faced the consequences of the evil they have done. You, on the other hand, if you’re not old and cushioned by wealth, will.

A functioning society would throw all these people in jail and take all their money and power. America? Canada? Britain?

We re-elect them and make sure they get richer and richer.

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Simple Advice For the Cold Emergency

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On February 16, 2021

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So, a lot of places are getting cold weather they aren’t used to. As a commenter noted there are some simple things you can do.

  • Your pipes may not be insulated. Run your faucets (all of them, warm and cold) at a trickle. Otherwise the pipes may burst.

If you have lost power and thus heat:

  • Pick a single room to live in. Put a blanket under you, not just on top. Put blankets or other cloth or plastic around the windows and the doors to keep warm air in.
  • Do not use heating devices which produce a lot of carbon monoxide. Don’t run your car inside to get heat. You can use candles for heat (in a room, they make a difference, but don’t fall asleep with them on.) If you are burning wood in a fireplace, make sure the flu is open. If you haven’t used it in years, don’t assume the chimney is unblocked and don’t go to sleep with the fire on.
  • a blanket fort can make a big difference. Likewise, setting up a tent inside, if you have one.
  • Everyone sleeps in the same room. If comfortable doing so, sleep together to share body warmth.
  • Do pee, don’t hold it because “it keeps you warm.”
  • Fill your bathtub with water if there’s any concern that you might also lose water.
  • If you’re concerned about frozen food, put it in an animal proof container outside.
  • If you have a working stove you can heat snow for water if you must. Take only the top layer of clean snow. You can also eat snow if you can’t heat it (I did so many times as a kid). It’s not ideal and not recommended but it’s better than going without water. Obviously if you have reason to believe it’s contaminated, reconsider.

Readers are encouraged to leave other tips in comments.

 

The Simplest Explanation For Not Breaking Covid Vaccine Patents

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On February 15, 2021

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The faster we get everyone immunized, throughout the world, the more likely we can stop Covid from going chronic, becoming the new flu (but more deadly, unless/until it mutates to become less fatal, which the untried models say it should.)

However, if Covid is cured, well, you can’t make money off Covid any more, can you?

Chronic Covid, mutating constantly, means more and more vaccines, and more and more and more money for vaccine makers.

Ghastly, and I know that many readers are probably, “that’s absurd”, but consider, does it have both explanatory and predictive power?

Does, “Covid makes the rich, richer so they want it to keep going” have explanatory and predictive power?

Qui Bono? Who benefits? Since the people who run our societies profit from Covid, why would they actually want it over (remember, billionaires have become vastly richer.)

I, too, dislike living in a society where this explanation has stronger predictive power than “our leaders don’t want us to die in large numbers, and become poverty-struck, just so they can get richer,” but that statement, well, look at it closely. If that was true, how would our rulers behave? Not just during Covid, but at other times?

Yeah.

I mean, I’ve been saying this sort of thing for a while, because it’s obviously true, but I’m embarrassed it took me so long to realize it applied to vaccine creators as well, especially since Pharma has a well-known bias towards medicines that are palliatives, not cures. Someone who needs your medicine again and again is much better than someone who needs it only once.

Gotta admire the pure predator instinct in our rulers. They’re the wolves, we’re the sheep and God, do they love mutton.

It’s them or us, and so far, it’s us.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 14, 2021

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On February 14, 2021

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“How The US Legalized Corruption”

[Indi Samarajiva, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 2-8-21]

“Americans have this thing called a fundraiser where you put a pile of bribes on a table, wave a wand of asparagus over it, and it just disappears. Access is still bought, but somehow because people ate food, it’s not corruption anymore. The press will literally report on the food. “In New York last weekend, $100,000 got donors a plate of grilled chicken and asparagus, a posed picture with President Trump in a palatial, 60-foot-long entryway, and a 20-minute group chat with the president. WTF is this? In any other country you wouldn’t report on the chicken, you’d report on the corruption.” (Details of a fund raiser dinner from the Washington Post).

Because this is all legal, Americans ignore how fucking insane it is. It’s just daylight bribery. This is what I mean when I say that America has legalized corruption. It’s not that your system is corrupt. Your system is corruption.

Property, Liberty, and the Rights of the Community: Lessons from Munn v. Illinois
Paul Kens [Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal, Volume 30 (2011)]

Abstract: When considering the extent to which the United States Constitution places a limit on government regulation of business, today’s historians and constitutional theorists treat the question as a matter of balancing economic liberty or property rights against government power. Moreover, modem scholars commonly maintain that this balancing formula represents the predominant tradition in constitutional history. Tracing it back to the tenants of Jacksonian democracy that emphasized distrust of government, they imply that constitutional history has developed as a straight line: always with an emphasis on individual liberty and always with a presumption that entrepreneurial liberty should be favored over governments’ power to regulate.

This paper will use the 1877 case Munn v. Illinois to demonstrate that prior to the late 1880s the paradigm for determining the constitution’s limits on government regulation of business was actually quite different. There is no doubt that the Court has always emphatically recognized the importance of property rights. Nevertheless, during the first century under the Constitution, it treated business regulation as a matter of balancing entrepreneurial liberty against the rights of the community. Furthermore, it consistently held that, because state economic regulations were an expression of popular sovereignty and rights of the community, they should be presumed to be valid.

Munn is significant because in the conventional narrative it is portrayed as a steppingstone in the straight line evolution of constitutional doctrine that emphasizes individual liberty. A closer look at the case and the events surrounding it will demonstrate, however, that the majority in Munn actually based its opinion on the traditional emphasis on rights of the community. It will further demonstrate that for more than a decade after the opinion the Supreme Court steadfastly clung to that traditional view. Even under persistent pressure to change.

Fear of the Few: John Adams and the Power Elite
Luke Mayville [Polity, Volume 47, Number 1, January 2015]

Abstract:The political thought that informed the design of the United States Constitution largely neglected the danger posed by socioeconomic elites. The writings of John Adams, I contend, are exceptional in this regard. Using Adams’s writings as a vantage point, this article exposes two important blind spots in mainstream Founding-era thought and the Constitution it informed. Whereas the likes of Hamilton and Madison insisted that majorities held the clear preponderance of power in republican America, Adams maintained that an elite of wealth, birth, and beauty retained overwhelming power even after the abolition of formal distinctions. And whereas Federalists sought security against the threat of majority tyranny, Adams’s principal fear was of aristocratic tyranny—specifically, the tendency of the elite few to undermine both popular representation and effective government.

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Open Thread

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On February 13, 2021

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Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked?

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On February 12, 2021

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One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school.

What?

This has struck me as crazy, because I don’t seem to have childhood amnesia. I didn’t like school, and I remember that almost no kid I ever met, even those who did, preferred school to days off.

But I shrugged until I read this teacher’s account of asking her students how their time off was.

Surprise, almost all of them were happy they had had the pandemic time off.

School is, well, mostly bad. It teaches things slowly, it mostly trains obedience, and it’s a social horror show. When we say social dynamics are like high school, we never mean anything good, and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other.

And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.

School is no different: information which is not used or found important, is lost, and it is lost quickly once the final, externally imposed, exam, is over.

Parents want their children to go back to school because it’s a babysitting service, and since we’re not paying parents to stay home, they need someone to take care of their kids. And yes, some may be falling behind or finding distance learning hard, but a decent system could make that up well enough.

But the idea that the kids themselves miss school, except in the sense that they can’t see their friends (which is pandemic related, and if it’s not safe to see them outside of school it isn’t safe to see them in school) is laughable.

It’s fairly obvious that the way we do school is terrible. It doesn’t teach knowledge quickly; the knowledge isn’t retained well, it destroys curiosity and natural desire to learn and it mostly has the effect of making children who should be outside running around into good little slaves: people who have learned to sit down, shut up, and do what teacher (or later, boss) says, the way they want it done.

It’s a wage-slave factory and that students come out with some actual knowledge is a secondary issue (if it wasn’t, effective illiteracy statistics wouldn’t be constantly  high.)

Effective traumatic conditioning makes you pretend that you enjoyed it. And that’s what school is: a way of taking the juice of life out of you and destroying your ability to make independent decisions and love learning.

We forget that, because what was done to us was horrible and all our trusted adults were onside with it. So as with horrible parents, we have to pretend they did it because they loved us.

Maybe they did, since they think being a slave is good, since most of them (us) are slaves, and we must believe that whatever we do is good.

But, at the least, let us not forget something simple. Most kids prefer not being at school to being at school. And if you have honest recollection of your childhood, you probably did too.

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Explosive Growth, Vaccines And Covid Variants

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On February 10, 2021

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Stumbled across this chart of projected Covid growth in the province of Alberta. This is a chart of what happens IF Alberta changes nothing in terms of its restrictions and vaccine count, ALL that changes is the B117 variant becomes dominant.

If that doesn’t concern you, we aren’t looking at the same chart.

The good news is that it appears that vaccines do reduce transmission and Pfizer, at least, work against B117. What that means is that in order to crush Covid we are either going to have to get almost everyone vaccinated or we are going to have to do a proper “Zero Covid” lockdown. There are other variants, as well, and the data against the South African variant is not as good, so it may be that vaccines may not do the job at all: they may deal with original Covid and B117 but mutations continue.

If that’s the case we will only get this under control with severe lockdowns and travel restrictions of the sort that most countries outside of Asia have been unwilling to do, plus wide-spread vaccination. mRNA vaccines have fast design times, and if we are willing to risk them without trials, and we are willing to force sharing of the design and production knowledge, we might use fast-turnaround vaccines to help against Covid.

The risk here is that Covid becomes endemic, a new normal, like the flu, never truly under control, but much more dangerous. This also may lead to a world where travel never recovers properly, especially between nations which have taken the disease seriously and dealt with it, and those which have not, like America, most of Europe and Canada.

To avoid this we need to stop dancing around. Break the vaccine patents and force sharing. Recompense the companies involved, a few tens of billions is all that is needed and is trivial to major governments. Go to CovidZero. And get vaccines into every arm.

One piece of good news is that the Russian vaccine, Sputnik V, a traditional vaccine, is 92% effective: only 3% less than then two mRNA vaccines. It doesn’t need very cold refridgeration and it doesn’t have the unknowns of a new tech. I would suggest, at least for the moment, to push it heavily for populations who are vaccine hesitant: it’s still a vaccine, but not an untried type.

The other point that should be made is that we need to defeat this in every country to be truly safe, and that means vaccines and support for poorer countries. Supply bottlenecks because a few companies and countries want to maintain IP laws are insane; they could leave us with a permanent disease problem which will hurt the economy for decades to come. This is yet another example of how we are unable to plan more than for a few weeks to a year or so in advance, no matter how important the issue.

For my readers, I reiterate that:

Be careful out there. Don’t be stupid, take what precautions you can, and be as safe as you can. I know for many of my readers, who work jobs that just aren’t safe, there are limits, but Covid isn’t over and I’d like for you to not get sick, get long Covid, or die.

This isn’t over yet.

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Bitcoin Is Reactionary Money

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On February 8, 2021

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This is only the second time I’ve written about Bitcoin. I have friends who have done very well off it, and Bitcoin’s fans are fanatical about it. This post will probably get more hate than everything else I’ve written combined.

The reason they’re fanatical is that it’s made many of them filthy rich, for doing nothing but being a first mover and HODLing (holding.)

Bitcoin’s original selling-proposition was a good one: peer-to-peer money; cut out the middleman. This is something which needs to be done, because the middlemen regularly abuse their power by shutting people they don’t approve of out of the system. This is true on the national levels, with sanctions, and true on the individual and corporate level. I remember when Visa, Matercard and PayPal all cut off Wikileaks, for example (long before 2016). They regularly cut access off from companies selling legal goods they don’t like (for example, various nootropics, or soft-porn.)

So a way of getting past these gatekeepers, whether sovereign or corporate, is needed, as those gatekeepers regularly abuse their power.

The problem is, to quote Stirling Newberry, that the bitcoin is the worst way to do something necessary. It has massive transaction costs, in terms of energy, and thus is bad for the environment. But, as money, it is reactionary money: it was designed to have 21 million bitcoins max, with less produced over time (halving rewards).

What this means is it vastly rewards early-movers. The sooner you got in, the more money you made. The people who made the right decision in the  past, control the future, much as the families who were rich in Florence in the 15th century are rich today.

This would be great if making one important decision good for yourself meant you would always make good decision in the future that were also good for other people. Money is power and people with more money have more power. Bitcoin creates a new power bloc: those who got in early.

There’s no reason, however, to assume one good decision for yourself means you will make future good decisions that are also good for other people. (At the extreme end, Genghis Khan says hi, and so does every other successful conqueror. So do the people who crashed the world economy in 08, but got bailed out.)

Bitcoin is deflationary: it gains value over time (assuming it doesn’t crash). Deflationary money is not good money. It restricts what can be done with it, rewards dead money (people who just sit on what they have), and empowers (again) people who won the past, not people who are doing good things in the present.

There is also the matter that bitcoin isn’t acting like money. It’s acting like a speculative resource bubble, which is because it is a speculative resource bubble. Making bitcoin is called “mining” for a reason: it was modeled after gold, except that unlike gold, you can’t find more of it once it’s done. It was designed to be GoldPLUS, for people who want to win once and be secure forever.

Its other great feature (which is fool’s gold) is that it can be used to bypass government restrictions. Or so fools think, since it’s a blockchain and every single transaction is recorded. Do NOT use bitcoin to pay for anything the government might one day want to track you down over. Use cash or a cryptocurrency engineered for privacy.

The question here is what’s going to happen when BTC is mostly mined out (mining the last block may take quite some time but it will be mined out before that. Twenty-one million coins can be mined, of that 18.5 have been mined.)

What happens to the value when the first mover advantage is gone? When it’s “mined out?”

Well, that depends on if there’s a genuine use-case. Is it a functional peer-to-peer payments system which lets you bypass both censorship and high fees? Right now, bitcoin is slower than many normal transactions. When mining ends, fees are expected to go up (since miners currently subsidize them while mining) and it isn’t actually anonymous money: in fact, given the ledger that permanently records every transaction, it’s almost perfectly engineered to be a totalitarian technology.

That said, what I see possibly happening is that it does stick around. Paypal is bringing it online, for example. Most people don’t hold much BTC in this future, they simply use BTC as a transaction medium, renting it, in effect, from the big HODLers. The lightning network also promises to speed up and cheapen transactions, there can be fixes to the transaction issues.

The other possibility is that once it’s no longer possible to get rich, we find out this is a bubble and a ponzi scheme. The first movers who were smart enough to cash out along the way do great and the bubble bursts. (If I were a big HODLer I’d hedge: cash out about half and buy off-chain assets, keep the rest in case BTC sticks around as infrastructure.)

Much of this depends on legal status and institutional support. Contrary to what a lot of BTC maximalists think, BTC can absolutely be shut down if enough big governments decide to do so. Set the forensics on the transaction chains and make its use illegal, subject to penalties or even jail time and yeah, that will destroy much of the value. It’s only a store of value if you can turn it into real world goods. If you can’t, it’s just a digital asset, worth less than a high level MMORPG character.

All that aside, the main issue is, again, that it’s reactionary money, intended to create a new class of winners who are then protected by the fact that they got in early enough, by the design of the coin itself.

It’s why BTC worked: because it was designed to create a protected asset class that rewarded first movers. The utopian stuff is overstated (because of the ledger). BTC is a greed project dressed up in idealist clothes, which doesn’t mean many people don’t genuinely believe its utopian promise. (Much as big capitalists constantly say how wonderful capitalism is for everyone and how they deserve to be rich because they make life better for everyone.)

All that said, I like a lot of BTC people I know and if it’s something of a scam, well, it’s not one-one hundredth as bad as what Wall Street does every day. In a world where almost all fortunes are illegitimate, based on scams or hurting other people, BTC at least gave some people outside the usual class a chance to get rich or make a bit of extra money.

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