i'll actually probably end up eating a lot less and lose a lot of weight.

and, i'm going to officially declare myself straight-edge until this is done. no cigarettes. no pot. no alcohol.

lots of coffee, though.

stop.

this disease is never going to go away.

deal with it.

ok, i need to focus.

i'm going to be stuck inside all summer and there's nothing i can do about it. i don't want to go outside and exercise, that's boring as fuck.

i might as well just forget about it and focus on getting some work done.

so, let's get this blog cleaned up, first.

when i first moved down here, before i got my nexus card, i had nothing to do but work, and i was more productive. that's fine. i'm due...

it's looking increasingly likely that if we let the politicians direct events then this is going to end in about two years with a mandatory vaccination order.

because we won't take common sense steps - we insist on being stupid.

what i'm waiting for is data out of south korea, today.

so, what the chinese appear to be doing is flipping the situation over.

they are currently blaming all new cases on foreigners, just like western governments have tried to do.

give it a few days, and they'll start reporting community transmission (no doubt never fully stopped), as a result of foreigners bringing it in.

it's as bad when they do it as when we do it. but, i'm more concerned about what's happening on the ground than about how the government wants to frame it; i'd take their data with a grain of salt, but ultimately with the expectation that they're creating a delay in the data. they'll publish, once they can frame it as something they can blamed on the outside world.

wait for it.

see, how do you react to this kind of stupidity?

she's not ignorant - she knows you're immune once you beat it. why would she say something that ignorant, then?

https://foxrochester.com/news/nation-world/white-house-task-force-no-one-is-immune-to-coronavirus

it's ostrich logic - stick your head in the sand, until it goes away.

if you think we can just shut everything down for a few weeks and the virus will go away somehow then you're just demonstrating your ignorance even further.

building immunity is how this gets better.

it's not going to just disappear, somehow.

listen, i'm not disputing that this is going to be hard.  the system is going to deal with a lot of people that are older and a lot of people with existing conditions, as well as a small number of otherwise healthy people that managed to get extremely unlucky, in being that one in 100,000.

but, this isn't a choice. we can't simply decide to suppress a virus, as though we're some omnipotent, dominating force. we can't pass a law that the virus will be suppressed. we can't rule in a court that the virus must be suppressed. we can pray, but there's no god to hear us; and, it's pretty circular logic, anyways, because how'd it get into circulation in the first place, then? so, sympathetic magic will not work, either.

suppression isn't a decision, it's a delusion.

what these reports actually say - and which the media is misrepresenting - is that suppression is as unlikely as mitigation is.

so, what have our politicians done? they've ignored the science, and insisted that if they lock the population down hard enough, if they man up, if they act tough, then the suppression will work - that it's a function of labour, that it depends on working hard enough, that we can work this out if we pull together, that we just have to try and we'll succeed.

but, that's not what the science says - it says we will be overwhelmed, regardless.

i think the uk government was right - extremely aggressive steps to protect the vulnerable, coupled with incentives for healthy people to interact with each other, would get us to substantial levels of immunity faster, which is what we want. trying to slow the process down just draws it out.

unfortunately, the british people reacted with hysteria and ignorance, due to however many years of slashes to public education in the thatcher era. they lacked the tools to understand what should be done, and resorted to posts on social media to "flatten the curve" to guide their behaviour, instead. the government had to react to public pressure, rather than follow the science.

are you ready to live like this for the next two years? the virus won't disappear via social distancing, it will always be there. if we don't have some algorithm to build immunity, we have no path back to normality.

we've acted irrationally in shutting everything down, and now we have no exit strategy except to wait two years for a vaccine and mass immunize.

these are our choices: allow the virus to circulate in the healthy population, or wait for a vaccine. if we choose the latter, we'll be locked down for two years.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/03/uk-backed-off-on-herd-immunity-to-beat-coronavirus-we-need-it/

i get a check for $1169 from odsp deposited into my account on or around the last day of every month. so, i will get $1169 deposited on march 31st, which is a tuesday. it comes in a little earlier if the last day of the month falls on a weekend.

i will get around $95 deposited on april 5th, which is a sunday, so it should come in on the 3rd or the 4th. this comes from a quarterly gst rebate; it's every three months. as this is the last one of the year, it may be a little more than that.

i'll also get about $65 deposited on the 10th, from the trillium rebate. this is a friday.

i am not eligible for the carbon tax credit because i have a student loan in default. yeah. well, those are the rules.

my rent is $750. i will also need to pay a $30 internet bill. i don't have phone or cable access - i do everything over the internet, allowing me to keep my finances dramatically down. i watch youtube; i use google voice for outgoing calls, and i pay $0.99/month and $0.01/minute for access to a mailbox at a voip account for incoming calls, who i then call back.

i am eligible for a hydro rebate of $45, which was enough to cover the cost of my bill, until the ford government changed the rates and altered the formula; after an apparent backlash, they appear to have fixed this, so i expect the rebate to cover my hydro bill again, moving forward.

i do not have a driver's license and spend $0 on gas. i have a bicycle, but i often prefer to walk.

so, my only other expense is groceries, which is about $200/month, at most, and usually less.

so, i believe i'm actually in an enviable position at this point.

if the economic consequences of this are long term, and it decreases the cost of rent, my stable disability check may be seen as an asset to landlords, which was initially the case when i moved down here. the job market was so bad here that being on disability was seen as less risky than being employed. that has changed, to my disadvantage.

so, it's in my benefit to have things get a lot worse.

but, i do hope they open the bars back up soon, or any gains will be pyrrhic.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/epg87m/coronavirus-canada-needs-a-national-rent-freeze

it really is a dramatic party reversal.

20 years ago, you would have expected republicans to think this was the beginning of an end times prophesy and jesus was coming back any day, now. democrats would have laughed at them and told them the data doesn't justify much of any response at all, and been right.

nowadays, democrats seem to be the more pliable, more controllable population - the group that does what the media tells them, and perhaps even lacks the ability to think critically for themselves. we've apparently replaced evangelical christianity with alarmism from msnbc. and, while republicans as a whole may not be following the science very well, either, they are at least demonstrating a tendency towards skepticism, which is a prerequisite towards the embrace of rationalism and the acceptance of the primacy of empiricalism.

i would have never identified as a democrat in the first place, but, like most people several rungs to the left of the political spectrum, i've long seen the democrats as a kind of lesser evil - sometimes. ok, not really; when challenged, i've generally had difficulty making the point. were the democrats actually better than the republicans in the 1990-2020 period? we all say "yes", right away. it's a lot more difficult to make the argument using actual evidence.

and, i'm hardly about to endorse donald trump.

so, i'm not "switching parties". i was always a left-leaning independent that tended to pick between the democrats and greens, and i'm still going to lean towards preferring a third party option.

but, the democrats are increasingly becoming the stupid party, culturally - they're the party of pliable idiots that just repeat what the media tells them. they're the sheeple. they're the herd....

and, the republicans have a long way to go before they're an acceptable option. but they're at least moving in the right direction.

for now, biden v trump is like obama v romney - they're both so unacceptable, and in a lot of ways so similar, that who cares who wins, really?

but, i'm increasingly of the view that the republican candidate in 2024 is going to be well to the left of the democratic candidate, and we're going to see big shifts in voter preference.

it's just the trendlines - the republicans are still way too right-wing to even consider as an option, but they are trending hard to the left as they increasingly become the party of workers; the democrats have been hugging the centre for decades, and are now beginning to move decisively to the right, as they are increasingly defined as the party of evangelical blacks.

if those trajectories hold, it won't be long before the republicans really are the lesser evil.

right now, they're both unacceptable.

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/17/816501871/poll-as-coronavirus-spreads-fewer-americans-see-pandemic-as-a-real-threat

let's imagine this, actually. let's get cybernetic.

if you have a patient that is fucked by this and is having a hard time producing their own antibodies, could you hook them up to a machine that produces antibodies and injects it into their blood?

i'm not imaging a factory, i'm imagining something biological - an antibody-producing culture in a box, and one that ideally generates energy using photosynthesis. so, you'd just hook yourself up to the lamp, or sit by the window and let the beneficial bacteria filter your blood for you - like a symbiotic, external kidney. make it a kidney shaped box...

wait for it.

that's a treatment that we might see in not too long for this, for those most fucked by it - a blood infusion.

"blood letting? leeches?"

no, raoul. blood transfusions.

https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-drugs-can-antibodies-from-survivors-help/a-52806428

they never followed through with it...

there isn't one.

oops?

https://fortune.com/2020/02/18/coronavirus-sars-vaccine-development/

are they even trying to administer the sars vaccine?

well?

so,

1) while existing immunity from the 2003 sars can potentially defeat weak cases of covid-19,

2) the new virus is different enough that the immunity is very partial and really reliant on good luck. it would have to be very marginal transmission. but, that's the bulk of it, right?

3) however, it remains to be seen if existing immunity may lead to quick synergy with newly produced antibodies; that is, while existing immunity to the old sars won't beat the new virus, it very well might help dramatically. and that might explain what we're seeing in these small, isolated southeast asian countries.

ok. no.

the new virus seems to have changed it's geometry just enough that the old antibodies are going to have a hard time with it.

this is indeed very flu-like - it's the reason you need the new vaccine every year, the virus keeps shuffling it's geometry around just enough to evade the antibodies.

i repeat: this study indicates that antibodies present in the survivors of the 2003 sars outbreak should defeat the new virus, in sufficiently low concentrations.

if it's enough to stop mild cases, it's enough to stop transmission from mild cases.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.991570v1.full

so, what this is saying is that the antibody can neutralize the virus, but only at low concentrations.

when you have partial immunity like this, your body tends to overreact. what happens when you increase the concentration of the antibody?

let's hope more research is done into this.

again: it might be the actual reason there's almost no cases in hong kong, taiwan or singapore. those thug tactics shouldn't actually work....

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.991570v1.full

so, somewhat hilariously, the article being run in parallel by a few right-wing british papers seems to have picked out the wrong post in the following twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/proteinimaging

if you scroll down to mar 17th, you see the following post, which links to a spectroscopy lab:

https://twitter.com/proteinimaging/status/1239849535188488192

that lab is doing interesting work on trying to understand the geometry of the virus, which will be useful to the chemists that will need to find the right geometry to bind the virus with, if they want to create anti-viral drugs for people that can't develop their own antibodies, with or without the aid of vaccines.

but, the study that the article is about is the next twitter post down, which is a retweet and links to the following study:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.13.991570v1

as i said: i know the daily mail isn't a very good source. but, it did get me to where i want to get to. let me look at that more closely...

i wish the daily mail would have sourced this better; the link to the telegraph article isn't any better. i know these are sketchy sources.

but, i might have been on to something, eh?

it would explain the lack of transmission in a few of these south asian countries, if the 2003 sars outbreak was far more widespread there than previously realized.

and, as mentioned, it could be useful in skipping a few steps on developing a vaccine.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8133255/British-scientists-discover-antibody-blood-patient-fought-SARS.html

i wonder if the situation in south korea, who wasn't affected by the 2003 outbreak (unlike singapore or taiwan) is being misunderstood.

it seems like the initial spike in cases was extremely localized, as it was the result of a foolish religious ritual. but, the authorities caught it immediately and stopped it - and perhaps it was very easy to do that because it was so obvious what actually happened..

over the last week, they seem to be experiencing a second wave that actually looks quite a bit like the same kind of onset we've seen in other oecd countries, and is probably not sourced from the initial fiasco. there have been issues in nursing homes, as a consequence of people being foolish, and they seem to be acting as radiators, as they are elsewhere.

i've struggled to kind of put this in perspective as, while south korea does have a history of authoritarian government, in fact us-backed authoritarian government, it's been a democratic state since around the time that the berlin wall fell and there isn't any particular reason to be overly suspicious about the stats. yet, it is known that these kinds of measures don't work. i have a hypothesis about immunity in taiwan and singapore. but, south korea seems like this strange success case, after pushing down policies that shouldn't work.

it could be that, like japan, that initial spike and fall was misleading as it didn't actually represent the onset of community spread, and they're actually just getting started.

so, that was my laptop test post.

let me brush my teeth and hunker down on this.

i've got the battery back in the laptop to protect from random electrical losses, but it seems to be ok so long as i keep a max of 2 gb of ram in. let's hope that holds....

i want to weigh in a little on the question of targeting benefits v universality, because it's just another example of the skewed spectrum.

if you read marx, he had this idea: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. and, he actually used that to argue for something roughly equivalent to what we might call equity rather than equality, nowadays.

i believe that the exact example he used was housing, as it flips the paradigm over. in capitalism, you get whatever house that you can afford, which may mean that large families at the bottom of the income scale may live in poverty and squalor. the argument marx was making was that housing should be determined by need, rather than status. so, a single doctor may end up living in a room, while a janitor with six kids lives in a mansion - because that would reflect their needs.

and, generally, since then, leftists have argued that we should come together to ensure that we all have access to what we need, not that we should have an equality of outcome so that we can all access what we want through universal benefits. that universality would generally be more readily associated with liberalism, rather than socialism.

so, what would marx and his contemporaries (like bakunin.) think regarding how resources should be distributed on issues like tuition and health care? well, they would abolish the financial component of it in the first place, granted. but, insofar as they accepted the validity of the state at all, they would have seen it as an equalizer, to ensure that those who have less are granted access to what they need. they would not for a second accept the idea that everybody should get the same subsidy, whether they need it or not.

i'm not telling you what you should think.

but, historically speaking, means-testing is actually the more readily socialist and more explicitly left-wing policy, whereas universality is kind of more of a bourgeois liberal kind of thing.

i found the hearing request form, on the other side of the room, behind something.

there's no way i put it there.

but, thanks for bringing it back, pig.

so, i am for real mere moments from getting back to focusing on this.

the divisional court is closed for at least two more weeks, so i have no choice but to wait. if they stay closed past the third, i'm going to file a motion to have the case labeled as urgent because it could be closed for a while.

in the mean time, nobody's answering the phone.

i need to clean up the posts over the last two weeks before i get to writing those reviews.