Miscellaneous material to start your week.
- Umair Haque is rightly frustrated that we haven't learned and applied obvious lessons about how to fight COVID after two years, while also warning against any assumptions that the Omicron variant will go easy on us. Ian Bogost writes about the realization that due in large part to reckless government choices, we may never make it to a post-COVID future. But Nesrine Malik pushes us to keep fighting to limit the damage we do to the people around us. And CBC News interviews David Fisman about the role of improved masking in stopping the spread of a more contagious variant.
- Bobbi-Jean MacKinnon talks to Colin Furness about the need to finally acknowledge - and act on - the reality that ventilation systems need to be upgraded to respond to an airborne pathogen. And Kathryn May reports that the federal government has delayed plans to push public employees back into common office spaces.
- Matt Stoller discusses how the factors causing the U.S.' supply chain disruptions include warped corporate incentives which make it profitable for some companies to cause a cargo traffic jam.
- Paul Mason writes that the fall of Boris Johnson is the result of a toxic party ideology which is incapable of acting in the public interest.
- Brandon Doucet argues that it's long past time for Canadians to have truly universal health care, including public coverage for prescription drugs and dental care. And Alex Hemingway writes that fiscal responsibility means making positive investments in people's health and well-being - not imposing punitive austerity.
- Finally, Patricia Callahan, James Bandler, Justin Elliott, Doris Burke and Jeff Ernsthausen trace how wealth concentrated in the Scripps, Mellon and Mars families in the early 20th century has turned into a twelve-figure pile of assets steered away from any tax responsibilities.
I think it will end before 2024. Our immune system synthesizes a geometric range of responses to a coronavirus. For multiple exposures (triggering immune system) the geometries the immune system spits out will overlap in part. I'm 55% sure we have waved the range of COVID from spike optimized to initial toxicity maximizing from the wild. The side effects are why no rapid uptake yet of boosters or security is threatened next one. Another is there are 3 great new cdn vaccines each scaleable in some novel way, going into testing the last month. A growable tobacco, an inhalable one, or a reproducing one might be worth waiting for.
ReplyDeleteI plan to subsidize a nanotech and a space future next decade, as my Covid response. This involves liveable cities. I've known nature is good and too much concrete bad, but if you took away 1/2 of NYC's concrete and replaced it with nature and fields, it would be a nice environment. Aluminum and commerce materials science is why. The bulk stuff of tomorrow will be nanotechnology.
I don't think our existing IT screen or hologram focus, will be good enough a resolution to make the world post-COVID. 30-60-90 lattices look better. That is metal inclusions in perhaps a glass or ceramic or alloy. Carbon seems only good for media screens and volumes. The healthy parts of the world have likely had E.Engineering degrees or infrastructure (hydro has made most of Canada want healthy environments). In the future this will switch to magnetic and nanotech. ANd design principles will improve the structure of cucibles ar presently designed concrete, whatever the underlying infrastructure and logistics is.