Your job won’t love you back, no matter what love you give it. But the people you work with will. Organizations know this, and the worst among them actively exploit the bonds between colleagues to extract more labour, correctly assuming that you’re more willing to tolerate bad work conditions to protect your friends. Luckily, the strength of your bonds doesn’t only serve profit and productivity; it can also be harnessed for genuine solidarity. Labour organizing is most urgently about material conditions, about safe working environments and pay equity and adequate workloads and time for rest, but at its core it is also an expression of your collective morality: how should people be treated?

From Jenny at The Roof Is On Phire

Another point overlooked by liberal internationalists is one made by Keynes in the interwar period as he retreated from his earlier liberalism. He worried that economic interdependence could increase the scope for friction between countries, even to the point of provoking war. Interestingly, economic relations within the eurozone often resemble war by other means. Germany looks to its eurozone partners (and other foreigners) to bridge the huge gap between what it produces and what it consumes, which is reflected in an astonishing current account surplus that was running at 7 per cent of gross domestic product at the start of the pandemic. This surplus is the counterpart of an excess of German savings over investment. Those savings were channelled into financing balance of payments deficits in southern Europe before the eurozone debt crisis of 2009-12.

German export dependency has often been a drag on the eurozone economy but, far from being grateful to the countries running counterpart deficits, Germany berated them in the eurozone debt crisis for supposedly profligate fiscal policies, while helping inflict savage shrinkage on the Greek economy and austerity more generally. In effect, argues Michael Pettis of Peking university, these peripheral countries absorbed the shortfall in German demand by increasing their unemployment and relaying excess German savings into investment booms that resulted in serious misallocations of capital.

Germany just can’t quit being the wrecking ball of Europe.

Also:

Two hundred years is a long time for a vastly-complex society-wide project to keep getting support and enthusiasm, fed by nothing but pure confidence that these discoveries streaming out of the Royal Society papers will eventually someday actually do something.

They do not die screaming in terror, nor have they lost faith in each other.² It is a similar moral to Albert Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus”: the near-certainty of failure should not lead to resignation, but to even more determination. To end your life contentedly and without regrets, you need to know that you tried, regardless of the outcome.

[source]

In February, a study of “the world’s least affordable housing markets” showed how Canada’s speculative bubble has made Toronto and Vancouver one of the world’s frontrunners when it comes to unaffordable housing. Using a scale in which a rating of over 5.1 is “severely unaffordable,” Toronto, with a score of 8.6,  beat out London and San Francisco. Vancouver at a staggering 11.9, is entirely off the chart. The US Federal Reserve’s “Exuberance Index” has shown that, as one media report puts it, “Canadian home prices have been in bubble territory for 6 years without a correction.”

There’s a pandemic on that our governments continue to respond to in delayed and reactionary ways. There’s apparently no plan for actually dealing with covid which means the de facto plan is a dramatically degraded healthcare system, the death of our loved ones from covid and other preventable causes, and an indefinitely dragging economy.

This dramatic institutional failure will fuel fascism in America and many other places.

Canada has a lot of problems and is mismanaging the pandemic in many ways, but it’s not like America. I wish I could get more of my loved ones to immigrate here or elsewhere.

It’s Christmas and I hope you are snug with your loved ones and a tree and a good meal. Take care of one another.

I do disagree with this graph hitting 1 million cases. We don’t have the testing capacity to record this many cases. We will run out of tests, reagents, and plastic. Lab capacity is finite. We would hit a plateau in case reporting, while the “true” cases may continue to increase.

A cornerstone of BC’s approach to keeping the numbers down for the last year seems to be limited testing for covid (along with straight up data withholding). Looks like the rest of you will be joining us shortly, whether you want to or not!

Because while we are investing heavily in vaccination, the sense that the pandemic is going to “end” at some point in the not-to-distant future is leading to an underinvestment in other structural solutions we are going to need – a revolution in filtration and ventilation so that buildings do not readily spread disease and free, readily-available rapid testing to make gatherings safer.

The sense seems to be that endemic Covid will look something like the flu, but we know that Covid is currently much more deadly than flu, so is there any good reason to believe this to be the case?

And further, what people do not realize is that the flu is actually much more deadly than the estimates of flu deaths suggest.

[from Jeremy Chrystler]

• spread the virus,
• don’t develop much immunity to future infection,
• and can get long covid.

Most countries have done very limited asymptomatic testing and most research is obviously on symptomatic people, so it’s hard to know how many people this group includes.

This meta-analysis summarizes what we do know and it’s not great.

The pooled percentage of asymptomatic infections was 0.25% among the tested population and 40.50% among the confirmed population. The high percentage of asymptomatic infections highlights the potential transmission risk of asymptomatic infections in communities.

0.25% is high, but remember that testing isn’t random – travellers, pregnant women, healthcare workers feature heavily in the sample.