the reason i'm focusing on new york is that it is the most direct way to understand what's actually happening with the virus and consequently make projections about what is going to happen in canada, soon - that is, whether people like cuomo come out of this looking more like joe friday.......or maxwell smart.

the big drop today is finally aligning the shape of the number of deaths per day with the other stats. this is a tentative step towards the ultimate shape being peakish rather than plateauish, which is suggestive (but, not definitive proof.) of this burning out due to widespread immunity rather than a decrease in infection rates. the other numbers have also declined enough to conclude that any spikes that occur over the next two-three weeks are the result of re-exposure over easter - if that is even possible, anymore, due to such widespread immunity (which does not mean it's safe to visit your nana, yet).

but, this is day-to-day.

if the deaths in the city end up peaking at around 10,000, that is going to suggest immunity levels between 60-70%, and an ultimate mortality rate of between 0.0005% and 0.0020% in my model - which is in line with a seasonal flu, even if the curve doesn't include the very young (and, so, is shifted towards the very old).

we'll see how this continues to work out over the next few days.

the numbers next week are going to be very interesting.

geez, i got to ranting there, didn't i?

i need to get that cleaning done.

this water v salt delivery mechanism is something that is still being studied.

i used the term "water soluble" and that might be a little misleading. you do want the chemical to eventually pass through the membrane into the cell. but, the basic difference between the hemihydrate (the generic) and the brand name is that the hemihydrate attaches the estrogen to a water molecule in the pill, and essentially releases the estrogen in the presence of water, whereas the brand name attaches the estrogen to a salt molecule, which only releases the estrogen when it gets to the liver, and sort of protects it from the gastric acid. 

so, when you take a hemihydrate, it just dissolves in your stomach, because it doesn't have that ester to protect it from the acid - it just dissolves on contact with water. instead, you need to take it under your tongue, where it's released directly into your bloodstream. this produces a peak in blood concentration, followed by a fast decline.

when you take the brand name, the estrogen-ester compound actually absorbs into your blood, to be broken down by your liver - and will then actually even return to your liver for future storage and release. this leads to lower but more stable levels of blood concentration.

the ideal, of course, would be for high and stable levels of blood concentration, but that is hard with this chemical. you could conceivably take massive injections every couple of days, but again - that feels like a drug addiction. i don't want to do that...and i don't want needle marks on my arms. yuck.

i've clearly prioritized having stable amounts that are a little lower over having these spikes. and, let's understand what estrogen is and what these spikes can do - we're talking about crying fits, irrational outbursts, etc. it's pms, basically. every six hours. i have a sneaking suspicion that this is a part of the reason suicide rates are so high - the way this seems to be often prescribed is actually quite reckless. 

cis-women can get around this by taking the pill, which is basically what i'm doing. but, let me ask all the cis-women out there - how long do you think you'd survive if your estrogen peaked and fell 2, 3, 4 times a day? that would be hell, right? that is actually what so many of these transgirls are doing to themselves, and it doesn't increase the efficacy, either.

so, the difference is that the generic should be taken under your tongue and produces a steep spike followed by a sharp decline, while the brand name should be taken orally and produces a more stable level over longer periods. 

my estrogen blood tests have been sufficient. what my doctor told me, verbatim, was to not change what i'm doing, because the concentrations were quite high. i've boosted dosage twice in the last five years. how many more times? well, i've been more concerned about offloading the effects of the cyproterone acetate on my liver, which i'd like to do by removing my testicles. but, if this was hard before, it's even harder now - that's an elective surgery, and there's going to be a backlog when the virus is over.

but, i just spent some time taking a closer look at numbers coming from studies done over the last two years or so (that is, updated data), and while the general difference appears to continue to be upheld, clarification on the difference in reuptake is making me wonder if i shouldn't be optimizing this by mixing it up.

i currently take one 2 mg pill of estrace four times a day, that is every six hours (obviously, i'm rarely exactly on time). i should get about 50 pg/ml from each one after six hours, and it should stay above 35 pg/ml for almost two days. that means that at midnight every day, i should have about 200 pg/ml from the four pills i took over the previous day, and another 100+ from the pills i took the day before that, for average levels in the high 200s or low 300s, which is what i've been tested at - and is statistically higher than almost all cis-women, even if it cuts out the peaks in the cycle, which are much higher.

if i were to take it under my tongue, i'd jump up to 5-600 pg/ml as quickly as within five minutes, but it would crash within an hour. so, i'd end up with a kind of 45 minute estrogen high, followed by a long crash that is going to level me off by the time it's time to take another one. i'd have to do that every six hours which would actually probably be very difficult, emotionally.

so, i want to be clear that i want to avoid that.

but, a lot of my perception around the downside of the sublingual method was the steepness of the curve. the data i'd seen up to this point suggested you'd be at almost nothing after 6 hours, so you'd be constantly ramping up and down. while the ramp up is reflected in the more recent data, it also suggests a bigger base level, so that you're not falling all the way to zero. i even found some studies that suggest that sublingual application may decay at the same rate as metabolic use.

i still don't want my estrogen spiking every six hours. so, i still need the brand name drugs. and, the data does seem to continue to uphold the previous conclusion that average levels are higher with oral administration, which is what i actually want.

but, i'm considering experimenting with sporadic sublingual applications, just to see what happens. maybe, before i go to a concert, for example.

it's thursday, april 16th. let's see if i can remind myself to try it sublingually on thursdays at noon for the next month and see what happens.

it also seems to be that they've recently added prometrium to the formulary, which is good news. i started off on prometrium, but moved to medroxy because it was covered. i ultimately wasn't happy with the outcome of this, but i had to weight the cost-benefit analysis, and the reality is that the drug was expensive. if i can get the prometrium covered, i'll jump to it in a second...

the appointment is in may.

does chris selley really think the concern is inflation, rather than profit?

i'm going to spin the question around: how do we eliminate our reliance on foreign labour in food production? that's not sustainable, but in some sense it's continuity. has anybody written the report that starts with handing out free (often already occupied.) land to immigrants in the 1800s and ends with tfws, as a narrative on the country's continual reliance on foreign labour for food production?

or the slow collapse of the family farm into these massive corporate conglomerations that have the nerve to import slaves and then send them back?

i've been arguing for a very long time that this system is fundamentally incompatible with a free society - it's just a more humane type of slavery, by another name. i know - capitalism is, in general. maybe i'm the one that even told you that. but, this is ethnic. if capitalism in general is barely tolerable, it's these tfws that are across the line of acceptability, of decency and of dignity. this should simply not exist at all.

so, how do you just shut this terrible system down altogether?

i don't actually want to bring back the family farm. maybe we could have avoided losing it, but maybe it's technological determinism - maybe it was inevitable. maybe. but, right now, trying to move back to family farming would be on par with some kind of communist experiment. a communist experiment, you say? what could go wrong?

i'm in strong support of increasing automation in farming, actually. i'd like to see more indoor growing, and less carbon produced by transportation. my carbon footprint is so low you can't even trip over it, but i do have one guilty habit - it's not air travel, exactly (i'd actually rather take the bus.), but the reliance on fruit in my diet, much of which is imported from the southern united states, or mexico. i want to be able to buy strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, bananas, tomatoes, kiwis, pineapple and whatever other fruit you can think of, as well as green peppers, which are the only technical vegetable that i buy regularly, at all times of year, in this country, with a minimal travel footprint. you could probably grow all of these things in leamington.

but, i don't see any particular reason why you actually need humans to do any of this. you may claim that fruit must be picked, but i'll tell you, actually - i'm perfectly happy buying a literal bushel of strawberries out of a bin if it took three hours to transit, instead of sitting three weeks in a plastic container designed to maximize it's shelf-life. you don't have to lay the strawberries down nicely on top of each other in that plastic container. i don't even need the packaging at all; we'd all be better off without it, really. so, this is kind of a weak concern. there's ways around it, even if it means changing how we package and distribute our food, which we need to be looking at ways to do, anyways.

it's never really been cost effective to do this, previously.

is it cost effective now? if not now, when?

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/chris-selley-ottawas-plan-for-quarantining-temporary-foreign-workers-is-more-bizarre-than-comforting

the fact is that there's no science behind the border closure at all. this is just politics - and it's bad politics, the politics of nationalism, of division and of fear.

the messaging from trudeau is that he wants to take an insular, right-wing approach to this and put up more and more borders to keep us more and more walled off (or in.), apparently under pressure from the evan solomons of the world, which he seems to think produce compelling arguments.

but, the science was always clear - this hinders, it does not help.

it doesn't look like much is going to be open in michigan for a while, so a re-opened border actually probably doesn't help me much, especially not now since i've spent the month's money on food, and pot. but, i'd support reopening the border asap, regardless - even it it's only one-way.

https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/restrictions-at-canada-u-s-border-could-soon-be-eased-trump-suggests

you are in charge of your own health - not the doctors, not the pharmacists, not your boss and not the fucking government.

never forget that.

the generics seem to mostly come in from india.

so, up here in canada, where many of the drug stores are run by recent indian emigrants, it makes sense to think that somebody is getting a deal, if they know somebody that knows somebody, in getting supply in at a very low rate - which can then be marked starkly up.

and, they don't care - it's just business.

i'm not even actually arguing that this pharmacist is wrong.

what i'm arguing is that this pharmacist doesn't seem to have much interest in anything besides maximizing profit. she seems to be pushing the generics because she'll make more money that way, not due to any kind of scientific argument, one way or the other.

i doubt she even knows the difference, let alone cares about the efficacy of the treatment.

and, you have to always remember this when you're dealing with healthcare professionals - we live in a capitalist society, which means the number one priority is always profit.

don't forget to ignore pelosi while you're at it.

https://www.newsweek.com/pelosi-urges-americans-ignore-trump-listen-scientists-says-president-caused-unnecessary-deaths-1497922

"i put a lot of effort into those slides."

touche.

</sarcasm>.

i expected that the first peer-reviewed paper on global warming would be an easily googleable thing, but it doesn't seem like anybody's prioritized making that declaration. some things hit us paradigmatically, others are slow to take root; our understanding of global warming has been slow and incremental, rather than sudden and immediate.

in the end, people aren't going to be looking back at actual bad science in relation to covid-19. i haven't seen a lot of specious articles or reports from actual scientists; my criticism has been towards governments, and towards media. i've often reacted to bad information produced by governments and media (and, to an extent, they're the same thing) by directing readers to pre-print papers. so, let's not confuse the comparison even more.

with that in mind, it is perhaps worth noting how badly the media got it in the 70s.

https://www.newsweek.com/climate-change-prediction-perils-111927

governments, on the other hand, seem to have mostly written it off as pie-in-the-sky nonsense.

so, if you were standing in 1970 and you were waving your copy of newsweek and believing the reports from the white house (do you kids know who was president in 1970? he's a lot like the guy we have now, actually.) at face value, you'd have been pretty much exactly wrong.

and, what would the white knights have said?

you need to wait.

but, if you want a comparison, there it is.

we'll know when we get antibody testing. it doesn't have to be widespread, for this application; we'll know when we get a few representative samples.

you should remain skeptical, until then. i will continue to point out reasons why.

and, for fuck's sake, discard your faith in government bureaucrats stumbling through bad science with worse powerpoint slides. it's disgusting...

this situation will change in the upcoming months, and you'll be able to give these zealous democrats that are eager to jump into battle something more sciencey to make bad arguments from authority around, as they struggle for alpha idiot with the anti-science conservatives, who are unlikely to modify their messaging much, regardless.

right now, what these democrats are really doing is putting their faith in bad science, and that should always be strenuously avoided - because faith has no place in science.

to use a bad word, we're not "progressing" away from religion if we just elevate science to the priesthood, in the end. that's not secular humanism, that's some kind of dystopian nazism.

elevating science past religion means replacing faith with skepticism. that's the point, that's the goal, that's the end - it's how you know you're doing this right. and how you know when you aren't...

but people, today, are what they are.

you white knights need to shut up for a while and let science do it's job, first.

even at this stage in the pandemic, i wouldn't put higher odds than a coin toss on either side getting the concept right. is social distancing actually working, or is it just widespread immunity? we don't know; flip a coin.

i'll make my arguments as forcefully and convincingly as i can.

but, in the kind of data desert that we have with this, it's a coin toss. really.

governments have a prerogative to lean staunchly towards conservative policies, and that is what the response is reflective of, not any deep reverence to science. you have to remember that the government is ultimately driven by actuaries; they're taking the path that has the least amount of risk, and will do the least amount of harm - and has what they believe is the lowest projected cost. i think they're wrong on the second and third points, but it's the first point that is really the policy driver. our governments are deeply risk adverse, that is they're deeply conservative, when stripped to their core functions.

are the covid-19 models going to be pretty much completely wrong?

yes.

should you have expected them to have been able to produce something better with the data that they had?

no.

so, is the failure of covid-19 modelling reason to think that climate modelling is inaccurate, too?

i guess we should have seen that coming, and it's typical in it's characteristic of being so naively stupid that it's actually kind of complicated to coherently correct. it really pulls the rug out from underneath the entire concept of the scientific method, to try and compare modelling for a problem we've been working on with great interest for 40 years to something we've barely understood for 40 days. it's just simply an absurd thing to even try and make a comparison, regarding.

so, i don't want to take the bait and fall into a partisan argument around this, because i can tell you in advance where this is going, too - you'll have these white knight science defenders coming out swinging for the democratic party (most of whom have something like a grade 10 science education), arguing forcefully that the models are incapable of error, because they're science, and science is, like, the truth, and stuff. right. in fact, these idiots on the fake left will be making exactly the same mistake as their mirror-reflected idiots on the fake right, in trying to compare something we've been studying intensely for 40 years to something we've barely understood for 40 days. i'm not wading into this battle to be crowned alpha stupid fucking idiot. you guys can have that debate without me.

unlike climate change, we don't have enough data on covid-19 to create anything more useful than exceedingly speculative models.

we can do this comparison, if you want to do it, though, and the way to do it is to launch up the wayback machine and search for climate change articles written in the late 70s and early 80s. i'll see if i can find the first peer-reviewed paper on climate change, i'm sure somebody has figured this out. how accurate was it? i'd guess it was pretty brutal.

after all, these same geniuses are no doubt well aware of the global cooling scare in the 70s.

i'll leave it to somebody else to work out the details, but it's scary because of the anti-intellectualism underlying it, in the way that it really does completely sidestep the scientific method. you shouldn't need advanced degrees to realize that the comparison is absurd - that should be intuitive, should be completely obvious. so, why don't these people (on both sides of the debate) have basic levels of intuition towards things that any idiot can see are obviously true?

"it's just a different 'delivery system'. who cares, right?"

i'm not sure if you failed bio or chem.

or if you bothered to take either.

yes, it does matter. dramatically.

unfortunately, there are no doubt many people that didn't do this research, and are going to end up swallowing water-soluble estrogen, which will do absolutely nothing for them.

i'd guess these are going to be women taking estrogen for menopause, mostly.

and, then you'll hear them complain...

"the estrogen therapy doesn't work!"

well, you've been taking a placebo, you daft bitch.

again - why don't i want the generic?

because it's water soluble. that means i'd have to take it sublingually, which is going to absorb it directly into the blood, which is going to create spikes in blood levels and ultimately lead me to experience the hormone like i'm taking a drug - i'll get "high" on estrogen for an hour or something, and then i'll just piss it out through my kidneys. if i swallow it like an actual pill, it will just get destroyed by my stomach acids, and that would be completely useless.

it's not a different drug, it's a different delivery system, and it matters, in context. i was smart enough to actually look into this and figure it out. i'm not going to make the mistake of swallowing water-soluble estrogen.

if you can find me generic estrace that is actually metabolized, i'll take it.

but, i don't want to get high on estrogen (and then crash from it) over and over again, what i want is stable & constant levels, with minimal peaks and valleys.

so, i got through a few more calls today...

the pharmacy tried to push the generic estrogen on me, yet again, and actually got a little bit pushy with me about it.

"the brand name is on back-order. what we have is the generic, and that is what you will get!"

yeah. right. just call her the estrogen nazi, i guess. no estrace for me.

obviously, that's not acceptable customer service, and i was hardly going to tolerate anybody talking to me like that. so, i called around, found a store with the brand name and moved my prescription there, instead.

it is a bit of a walk, which is frustrating. but, we'll see how it works out from here. there are literally drug stores everywhere. i'm sure i can figure something out.

i was told it would be ready in the morning (early on the 16th), so i found myself in a bit of a quandary. i wanted to get up and clean, but i wanted to finish my shopping for the next couple of weeks, first. if i couldn't get the pills until the morning, should i wait? i decided i'd be better off doing the shopping today, and getting the pills last thing in the morning.

so, i left a little after 5:00 and, after two heavy trips, was back around 20:00 with basically everything i'd need to hermit until mid-may. i got immediately to putting some of this stuff away, and made some progress on it, before i sat down for a minute to check what time the store opens at.

and, the answer is that the store doesn't close.

"wait. so, that means i could pick up the pills at midnight, then. but, what if they're already bottled, then? if i can get them now..."

so, i gave them a call and they were indeed bottled, leading me to a third trip out around 21:30.

it's a 45 minute walk in both directions, so it's not sustainable, but i got what i wanted, along with a few other scattered things and was home by 11:30 - for the next roughly three weeks, solid. i don't plan to even open the door...

i did not buy any marijuana, this time, so i should be alert and focused and productive for the next three weeks, so long as the computers in the apartment continue to work.

ok.

the coffee is working.

it's time to get up.

there are serious ramifications of this as well, if it turns out in the end that we've collectively made the wrong decision.

for, if we all made the same decision together to take in one last ham, we may lose the social knowledge of ham-making, as our nanas all die off simultaneously; this last-ham prerogative would in turn end up rather pyrrhic, as we face a sordid and difficult no-ham future.

we may, in the end, see the development of ritual vomiting, as we plead with the gods to take the ham back, as a sacrifice, in return for a renaissance of ham-making knowledge.

but, it is too late to undo.

so, let's hope the nanas of the world don't fare too poorly this week, so that we may protect the precious wisdom behind this ancient ham production.

we're going to be able to empirically measure how people worked this through fairly soon.

really.

next week...

what?

it's a real dilemma. literally. we're going to see the data around this, soon.

so, there's a pandemic going around, and you're supposed to avoid your grandmother. this is understood by all. but, she's making a ham! so, what is the right choice, here? do you avoid your grandmother, and thereby miss out on the ham, or do you reason that she's going to die soon anyways, so you'd might as well get one more ham in before it's too late.

i'm a logician, i'm not an ethicist. don't look at me.

and, regarding these questions i've been drawing attention to?

1) the death toll in new york city is beginning to tip over into my middle range of mortality rates, which i believe was around 18,000. so, i'm willing to acknowledge that the 0.1% number is maybe too low a bound; the middle bound of 0.3% may turn out to be more correct, at least in new york city. but, it's not like this is going to be precisely constant through diverse populations and shifting demographics, either. everybody knows that new york city is an exceedingly densely populated place...

so, if the mortality rate in new york city ends up around 0.2% rather than 0.1%, i'll need to accept the adjustment. but, i'll still be, conceptually, much closer to the truth - if the antibody tests back up the point.

2) the data is messy, and the numbers are being revised, but, regardless, it's not going to be very much longer before i have to concede that it's a plateau, and not a peak. but, the other data seems to point more towards a peak than a plateau.

do i think there was perfect social distancing over easter? no. so, this is another thing we can test. if we accept that the likelihood of transmission over the previous weekend was much higher than it was over the preceding weekends, we should see the effects of this kick in about this time next week. if we see a small blip, we'll know that most of the population is probably already immune, as this increase in exposure will have led to minimal increases in hospitalization rates. but, if we see a substantive spike, we'll know that social distancing was working, until we decided that access to nana's delicious easter ham took priority over maintaining her actual life.

the most important thing i got from cuomo today is that it seems like he's going to make an attempt to correct the numbers coming out, to try and clarify how the curve is developing. it is probably not a coincidence that the dip under 700 was on a sunday; that would suggest some lagging into monday or tuesday.

in mathematics, we can actually talk about facts, if we are very careful in doing so. that's unusual in the existing epistemological framework, where our understanding of reality is necessarily limited by our inability to perfectly measure it. so, what exactly are the facts, here? that's what people like me are sitting here and trying to figure out, by analyzing the data in front of us.

and, these are two different things, facts and data. data is messy, full of error and full of bias. you can sometimes pull facts out of the data, but you have to do it carefully. you should never conflate the two ideas.

i am not one, but i could be if i wanted to be, and, to a very large extent, what a statistician does is analyze bias. they don't just look at the data, because they know immediately that the data, on it's face, is always wrong. so, they figure out tools to analyze the data, tools that are not objective, but are rather reliant on the assumptions put into them. if you want to get into the philosophy of this, look up david hilbert, who wrote most of it. but, the basic point is that anything a statistician is going to give you is really just their informed opinion, because what they're doing is trying to identify biases in the data and correct for them.

statisticians will consequently give you a variety of analyses, and they're all just somebody's opinion as to what test needs to be used where, what bounds are appropriate, etc.

so, when is something a fact? it's when you decide that it is, and you'll know it is when you've convinced yourself of it. that sounds hokey, but it isn't. first, you have to do more than just measure it once - if something is a fact, it should be repeatably demonstrable as such. worse, if you can't repeat the experiment, as is often the case in economics, and as is the case in the current scenario, then you need to be very cautious about using words like "fact". repeatability is fundamental to the idea of factuality. you should also be able to derive the same facts using multiple methods; that is, facts should be consistent. and, yes, you have to do the tests to figure this out; otherwise you shouldn't be using terms like "fact", as the definition of what a fact is is tied up in these tests.

we don't know how many people have died from this, and we don't know how many people have contracted it. we know how many people have come into hospitals, at least, but that's a very restricted subsample with large amounts of inherent bias that needs to be corrected for before anything can be extrapolated from it.

so, do we know the facts? no. we don't. that's what people like myself are trying to figure out. what are the facts here?

so, when i tell you that we need to wait to know if this is a curve or a peak, i'm pointing to the inaccuracies in the data - i'm pointing out that we shouldn't be drawing conclusions until we're sure that we have the facts clear, and i'm actually getting a little bit of back-up on that point from cuomo, who is expending what are currently sparse resources in trying to actually figure that out.

and, when i say we need to wait for antibody testing to understand whether this is crashing due to immunity or distancing, i'm also making an appeal to the facts - rather than relying on the correctness of models (which are an opinion), or interpolations of incomplete data sets.

what they've done is run a set of very, very loose models, declare the outcome of that modelling to be reality, and then measure the effectiveness of their behaviour based on the sanctity of the models. while we have no choice but to do the best we can in terms of building models to guide the public service, even if it's not good enough, there is really little excuse for the way they've presented these models. we really have to wait for the data to know the facts.

politicians are actually good people for scientists or logicians to argue with, because they're sneaky. they're good with words; they're good at debate, at spinning concepts over in confusing ways designed to obfuscate, even when they don't really fully understand what is actually exiting their lips. for a logician to sit down and really deconstruct these political briefings is actually great real-world debating practice, as it should help both in working through the problems in the presentation and also in helping clarify the concepts in the mind of the logician.

i would encourage it as good downtime practice, if you find yourself off for the rest of the semester, and unable to find a job in the existing economy.

canada has actually experienced some rather serious unrest during periods of serious war.

that's our actual history around this - strikes, riots, etc.

and, what percentage of the population has immigrated to canada at some point after 1950? 70%? 80%?

so, if they think that this attempt to rally around world war imagery is going to make us more compliant or lead to a round of flag-waving, they're probably in for a very rude awakening.

personally?

i think that bringing in war imagery during a pandemic is actually fairly inappropriate. i think that's actually fairly tone-deaf and kind of insensitive.

the ruling class seems to think it's war propaganda actually works, for some reason. but, nobody except the elite looks back at these world wars as a period of increased nationalist fervour, or whatever warped perception that the rulers seem to have about this. most people just interpret these wars as a lot of senseless slaughter. and, as wwII exits our living memory, what is left to replace it - korea. vietnam. aghanistan. iraq. - is even less likely to generate the kind of response in us that our rulers seem to think it's going to.

i'd stop doing that, if it were up to me.

nobody wants to rally around war imagery in 2020.

it's kind of barbaric.

if i'm so tired, am i actually sick?

i have no symptoms.

i think it was just the drugs.

and i think i'm up, now.

trudeau is talking about the "greatest generation" in his talk today.

if you are 90-100 years old today, you were born between 1920-1930. ish. that means, you were between 15-25 years old at the end of the second world war, and, unless you were a child soldier at the tail end of the german occupation, you did not actually fight in the second world war. essentially any existing veterans would be over the age of 95, at this point.

if you are 80-90 years old today, you were born between 1930-1940 and likely have few memories of the great depression, even if you remember the war.

if you are 70-80 years old today, you were born between 1940-1950 and likely do not remember the war at all. you've probably even spent your whole life identifying as a boomer.

and if you are 60-70 years old today, you were born after 1950 and are clearly a boomer.

so, the virus is mostly killing boomers. actually. the wwII veterans are already all dead and buried.

the trudeau government has a history of these kinds of messy anachronisms, especially in relation to his father. 2013-1985 = 28. they seemed to underestimate how much time that really was, or how old you'd have to be to actively remember politics in the 70s. that distance has only increased...

i would support opening up the benefit to people that make less than $1000/month. but, i actually make $1169/month. so, i still don't think i qualify for anything, but i haven't actually lost any income, either...

i've said this before - as a disability recipient, i probably have the most reliable, stable income in the country. it's designed that way, because we're the most vulnerable; this is maybe the one social system that is just intended to keep running, more or less no matter what. it's not very much money, but it's reliable. at least. i still have to deal with markets, and that's often frustrating, but the social contract with the disabled is that we get these monthly checks, more or less no matter what.

the trade-off is that you accept poverty in exchange for certainty, and i'm happy to do that due to how i've ordered my life around my art. others may, of course, have less of a choice. i should probably be on some kind of artist subsidy rather than strict disability, but that doesn't currently exist.

the point i'm getting at is that i'm not really complaining - my income is intended to be stable, if low, and i've prioritized freedom over wealth, in that sense. so, this is the consequence of that decision, even if it's kind of frustrating, as i watch all this money float around.

i'm eating well. i'm ok.

and i think i'm awake now, even. it's been two days, it's time to get up...

so, am i awake yet?

it's getting better.

soon.

remember that kid at school that always showed up late to class, listened to a walkman while the teacher was talking, never did any homework and then didn't care when she got a d+, even though everybody knew she was an a student?

that wasn't me. i was a bit of a punk, but i broadly did well in high school. in the end, i graduated with an a average....it could have been higher if i had applied myself, but it was an a, nonetheless. so, i was the punk kid that was maybe a little underwhelming to some, but still got (almost) straight as, anyways.

they say that the kind of student i described at the start is often the kind of student that ends up in management. if you're an a student, your boss will probably be a c student, because you want the smart people actually doing the work. the best way around this stupid reality is to get rid of the fucking bosses.

but, i wonder how prevalent the opposite situation is, the a student that shows up at work and, when placed in an under-stimulating environment, just...stops...caring. as the d+ student may screw around in class but excels at work, how many a students are there that just find themselves lighting blunts on break and throwing paper airplanes at the boss when they turn around, because they're so fucking bored and ultimately so terribly out of place in the office setting?

i don't know. i know that's what i was, and i know that's what i'd be if they sent me back to work. and, i'd have some d+ student boss yelling at me to stop screwing around at work.

but, i've never been a pothead, and i don't want to be one now.

i'm not actually a pothead.

i never was a pothead.

i don't want to ever be one, either. i'm confident i won't become one....

it's a disgusting habit. really. i notice it every time i go through this, and come out of it.

i'm still groggy, but i'm going to wake up soon enough. i might not get my moment of clarity from this pot, that was sitting in a warehouse for who knows how long, but i'm sure i'll know it when it's finally out of my system for a while.

i was a gifted kid; i was supposed to be a surgeon but gave up on it when i realized that i didn't really have the hand-eye coordination, the basic motor skills, to do it. you have to be good with your hands, and i'm really, really not, not at all. they use to yell at me for my bad handwriting, until they realized that i just didn't have the coordination to write on the lines. so, it just kind of clicked with me one day - the fact that i couldn't hit a baseball if my life depended on it (after eye surgery as a child) meant i'd probably have difficulties being an actual doctor, no matter how well i understood the concepts. so, i went through this other list of things.

but, i certainly never saw myself as a pothead.

as much as i might push this starving artist meme to the point of cliche, i've largely chosen this life. i decided that freedom was more important than income, that exploring the individualistic concerns of art were more important than contributing to the collective, etc. i've turned down good jobs. i've avoided academic opportunities. i've thrown away my family to embrace living on disability. i wish i had better options, granted. but, i've opted out as best as i can and i have quite a bit to show for it - and hopefully will have even more relatively soon.

but, i never grew up wanting to be a pothead, and i'll be damned if i'm going to turn into one now.

i just don't want to actually be that person.

i've more seriously considered growing tomatoes inside.

this particular apartment has air quality issues, and the last one had roaches. but, if i ever figure out how to get a tomato garden running, that's something i'd be more able to deal with the excess product of.

i don't want to be in a situation where "i have to use this bud up". i want to buy small amounts in the store when i need it, for specific and purposeful applications, with weeks or months of sober time in between.

why don't i just grow it?

i just don't smoke enough of it. even with one plant, i'd be giving 80% of it away. it's really twice a year tops, here, outside of concerts.

i could smoke more, you say.

that's the actual reason i do not want to grow it. it would be inevitable, and i just don't want to live like a dirty pothead.

so, if trump were to declare marijuana illegal by executive order, for example, would that work?

yeah.

if it's presented using the right argument, it would.

does the president have total authority?

i know that cuomo wants to cite the constitution. the judiciary might not think this is necessary.

it sort of depends on what kind of law that trump is actually citing. the division of powers (to use a canadian term to refer to the concept of states rights, which i've learned that you need to articulate carefully) is really about the legislature, not the executive; it's about deciding which laws passed in which house take precedent when they contradict each other, as they some times do.

the reality is that presidential executive orders are largely going to legally trounce all of that, especially when it has anything to do with security. the president is not a king, but he is a kind of napoleonic military dictatorship. the primary role is commander in chief. domestic priorities are kind of a secondary end-around, and not really how the system was designed. so, a lot of what the president actually does day-to-day should really be being done by congress, it is true, but the question of security is really distinctly presidential, and these executive orders are really not that different than proclamations, when you examine their legal weight.

yes, there are all kinds of arguments to use against an executive order. it has to be rational. it has to be proportional. etc. but, all the president really has to do to wield essentially unchecked authoritarian power is tie the order to security, and make a halfways coherent argument about thinking the policy is going to work.

so, can the president open new york city by executive order?

he can if he can convince a judge that the issue is in the domain of security, and that he really, honestly thinks that the action is safe, or perhaps that keeping the city shut is contributing to security issues in some other way, which may be less absurd in a few weeks, once it really warms up, and the number of homeless people starts to increase due to illegal evictions and as a consequence of mass joblessness.

can he do that? it's a harder argument than the one he made with the travel ban, granted. but, in a real sense, all he has to do is actually make it, because the court is unlikely to second guess him, once it gets appealed.

i guess it's an open question as to whether any of this is desirable or not.

but, i'd expect trump to prevail in court, if it comes down to it.

am i awake yet?

i dunno.

what else did i need to do today?

i called the human rights tribunal, and they told me the file hasn't been touched in weeks, and i'm best to send an email to the registrar. the deadline was the 24th of march and nothing was received, but that's probably not very relevant. i just want to understand what the next steps are.

i need to refill my estrogen prescription and probably call them tomorrow.

i think that's everything.

so, maybe i can get something to eat and focus on catching up with the vlogging. i need to clean in here tonight, too...

i'm very bitchy right now, clearly. that head cave didn't work very well. i'm just tired and grouchy and glitchy, right now. it won't last forever...

once i get my pills, i'm going to try to plan around being inside until the next time i need them again, which is going to be in mid may.

one thing at a time means stopping to eat, first.

utterly hopeless stupidity.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-calls-for-halt-to-us-funding-for-world-health-organization-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/

but, can he provide three reasons why biden is better than trump that are more convincing than something you'd hear on saturday night live and don't collapse into empty partisan statements?

*crickets*.

i don't care who wins this election.

at all.

call me irresponsible. whatever.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/ap-interview-sanders-says-opposing-biden-is-irresponsible/

what about new york? is that a peak or a plateau?

it's still not clear.

but, it had better decide pretty soon.

it's probably going to crash hard within a day or two.

of course, the corollary of that is that if we do antibody testing and find out that only 10% of the population has been infected then the mortality rate of the disease becomes rather distressing.

at 10% infected and .1% mortality, you're looking at around 33,000 deaths in the united states, total, and they're almost there. if the numbers keep going up, you'll need to increase the number of people infected, or increase the mortality rate, or both, to understand what's happening.

i think that the totality of the data suggests that the disease is extremely contagious and not very fatal, meaning you should be increasing the infected rate, rather than the mortality rate, in order to make sense of the numbers.

at 66% infected and .1% mortality, you're looking at 220,000 deaths - 8-9x as many as have already occurred. that is going to take a few months to happen, and much of the damage will be done in the midwest, but if i'm right then you need to shut down everything to prevent it - food distribution, pharmacies, hospitals, everything. my critique is not that it's impossible in theory to sit inside for six weeks, it's that we're not actually implementing enough of a policy to allow this to work and that, furthermore, in reality, we can't actually do it. so long as people are out in the city engaging in commerce, they are spreading the disease, and it's just a matter of time....

but, i don't want to shut down everything, i want stricter controls in place to protect those that specifically need it, and greater freedom of movement for people that don't require that level of protection, that can fight it off on their own.

we'll know when they test, and not before then.

and, if they don't test, we'll never know - although we should draw conclusions about why they aren't testing.

when will we know if these lockdowns were a stupid waste of time or not?

don't fall for their models that claim that we saved thousands of lives by staying inside. it's all a lot of complete bullshit.

the fact is that we won't know until we do mass testing for antibodies. if we find out immediately that 65-70% of the people tested have antibodies, we'll have to realize that this was a stupid waste of time. if we find out that the number is more like 20-60%, we'll have to conclude that we might have slowed it down a little, but the effects of the shutdown were ultimately minimal, except perhaps to make it easier to spread in high risk populations.

if immunity ends up closer to 10%, we'll know what we did actually stopped it.

and, it's not lower than 10%; if we get numbers much lower than that, we'll want to question them, and wonder what we're doing wrong.

conservatives and progressives are really subtle reflections of each other.

and, i hate all of them with every ounce of my being.

it's been a constant from day one that the trudeau government has had this kind of laser focus on these conservative, middle class type of family value systems and, in the process, has displayed an almost randian level of contempt for the poor. they truly don't seem to care much about people that don't want to breed, especially, even more so than those that can't or don't want to work.

it's going to hurt them in the long run if they don't reverse course on that.

all of the media surrounding the gst rebate increase states that your rebate will be doubled. it's just a constant statement, without much elaboration.

what i received was about $100 less than that, so it seemed like some idiot at the call center (and, i've worked in call centers - these people are fucking morons) pressed the wrong button. it happens. fine.

after multiple calls, i finally got through to somebody by refusing to enter my sin number.

the agent on the phone had a very difficult time explaining something that was very simple - she kept trying to tell me it had to do with extra amounts added as a consequence of children, which made absolutely no sense because i didn't have any children when it was counted up the first time, so the fact that i don't have any children now shouldn't affect a doubling of it.

so, i forced her to direct me to the actual web page, where it became clear that what she was trying to tell me was completely wrong. the right answer is that it's not the rebate that's doubled, it's the base amount - which, in my case, was the $290 that i received.

if i was dumb enough to have bred at some point before now, i would have had a higher base amount due to the number of state-supported children i'd be dragging around with me, most of whom would probably at least have fas, because about the only way i'd have managed to breed after aggressively pushing for an abortion is if the mother was such a fucking drunk that she barely noticed she was pregnant in the first place.

but, that wasn't the conceptual problem - it really had nothing to do with that.

it's really just some intentionally misleading advertising from the government. they double the base amount and keep the income constant, which works out to getting a check for the base amount, which is determined by the number of children you have, rather than your income.

i've been clear that i thoroughly reject any concept of "progressivism" as being fully synonymous with the conservative right. but, this government just continues to demonstrate how intellectually and conceptually bankrupt it really is - it's happy to throw the term around, but it seems eager to throw away literal progressive income support in favour of conservative rhetoric about family values at every opportunity that it gets; focusing on family size instead of income is in truth a deeply regressive approach.

so, i tried to call the divisional court, and it looks like i need to communicate via email, instead.

an email was sent. we'll see what's next.

i'm still sleepy...

in order to successfully overthrow and permanently get rid of capitalism, a majority of people are going to need to be able to open up the paper, or log on to the internet, and be able to effortlessly identify how the corporate/government press is lying to you.

this is a pre-requisite.

we're stuck until we can get over that.

am i awake?

i dunno.

i wanted to get the vlogging done first, but let me see if i can pivot into some of these calls today, instead.

this is a general truth - when you open up the newspapers and see headlines blaming things on russia or china, the way to read those newspaper headlines is always to interpret them as a statist tactic to deflect the blame.

so, for example, when the cia rigged the election in favour of trump (the other option was killing clinton. it simply wasn't going to happen.), they then floated fake news through their controlled media outlets - from the new york times to cnn - that would blame it all on russia. this worked spectacularly. rather than serious internal investigations into the relevant intelligence agencies leading to a restructuring and staunch restriction of power, which is long overdue, these agencies need to be seriously overhauled, you had a farcical series of reports trying to blame it on the president, himself. but, the truth doesn't matter to these people. it's all about building a narrative.

and, the fact that it was beyond obvious that the establishment was propping up trump from the start was beyond obvious to any halfways intelligent person is irrelevant. when faced with convincing arguments, they just yell and lie and deflect even louder. cue rachel maddow.

it's not some kind of partisan bickering gone wrong, it's an intentional psy-op to stop you from asking the right questions. was the election rigged? yes. did the russians rig it? no. who rigged it then? the cia. why? because they were afraid that clinton would start a world war. were they going to get caught if people looked into it? yes. so how do you deal with that? you launch a major media operation to blame it on the russians. if nobody asks the right questions, nobody gets the right answers.

has anybody else besides me even suggested to you that it was trump himself that rigged the election? no? exactly.

we'll never get anywhere in overthrowing capitalism, until we understand this basic truth: the media is worse than worthless, in this society. it's a tool of control. you have to be able to deconstruct the lies, and you have to be able to do it on the fly, in real time; media literacy is key. if you don't have it, they'll just keep lying to you, and you'll keep falling for it and we're perpetually fucked. this is so key...

and, that is what this article actually says - it's a (perhaps preemptive.) deflection away from accusations of data falsification in the united states. it says "maybe america is falsifying data, and maybe this is easy to uncover, but we're going to blame it on the chinese to distract from it, so nobody bothers to ask the right questions".

while the numbers from china may not be complete, this is projection and the way to read it is as an admission that the united states is publishing falsified data around the epidemic.

you'll need to wait for better data, granted. but, we've seen this repeatedly, now - whenever they do this, it's an admission of guilt.

i don't know how long it will take for the data to get out.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6814940/china-coronavirus-open-letter/

i warned about this a few times when it started up: these strains are mostly medicinal, in origin. so, they're designed to either treat physical pain (like arthritis) or to treat "anxiety" (as a bullshit diagnosis. anybody suffering from real anxiety would react very negatively to habitual marijuana use.) and depression, by essentially putting you to sleep. i mean, that's one way to do it. but, you'd might as well just prescribe them methadone if you're trying to treat depression by knocking them out; i'd argue this is a type of malpractice, actually. it was maybe the most scientifically illiterate court ruling in a long history of scientifically illiterate court rulings....

but, the result is that the product you're buying here in canada was not biologically engineered for recreational use, or the specific purposes of the drug that recreational users have for it, which are dramatically different than the uses that medicinal users have for it. recreational users want to use it to get high and laugh, to dance, to stimulate conversations - so they want an uplifting high, and a chatty buzz. medicinal users bizarrely actually want a numbing stone that just turns you into a vegetable.

so, i was worried that this would essentially end up as a different drug, and it's starting to feel like it has.

i would consequently be pretty apprehensive about using these strains recreationally. they seem to be producing a dulling effect akin to essentially turning your brain off, which appears to be the point of them. again, that's just not how marijuana is used recreationally. and, i might wonder what the long term effects of taking a drug like this, that is designed to slow you down, actually are.

i've often pointed to labeling as a reason to support legalization, for health reasons. you don't know what you're buying on the street. you don't! but, if they don't eventually get some more energetic, recreational type strains in then the inevitable conclusion is going to be that you do know what you're buying at the store, and it's the kind of pot you probably want to largely avoid.

i have no idea what strain i was buying on the black market. i know that i've been consistently disappointed by the reality that the focus on legal pot is as a pain reliever or sleep aid, and i was rarely disappointed by black market pot, which was always intended to be used recreationally.

i guess if i could figure out what the most common strains on the black market are, that would be a start to finding the combination i'm looking for.

right now, i'm enjoying a nice coffee, and hoping it wakes me up.

how was the pot, anyways?

my experience is that the quality of legal marijuana in canada has consistently been exceedingly poor due to the mass industrialization and shrink-wrapping of a product that should be available for fresh purchase. if you're happy with the marijuana industry in canada, you're probably the kind of person that buys your vegetables in plastic shrink-wrap; if you like to pick out your own tomatoes at the store, you're never going to really accept how this works, and you're just waiting for an eventual liberalization of the market.

i don't actually think that there is much of a presence of organized crime in the marijuana industry at all, actually - the illegal growing industry is largely local, and, broadly, very small scale. the primary reason that marijuana is unattractive to organized crime is that it's not addictive. it's less addictive than alcohol, even. so, it's useless to them.

i'm not fucking around - go downtown and find some pushers on the street. it's not hard to find them; you probably already know where they are, in your town. you ask them for pot, and they'll try to sell you coke or meth or e instead. they don't even carry pot, anymore.

it's not because the mark-up is too low, although i've remarked repeatedly about the lack of inflation in the cost of marijuana (it's been the same price for decades.). it's because they can't get you on it. these people don't want to sell you a five piece once a month, they want to get you addicted to a substance that is going to lead to you signing over your inheritance within a few months, or otherwise turn you into cheap labour for them. this is a business, a big business. meth will do that. coke will do that. smack will do it, too. pot is useless to them...

in however many years of buying pot on the black market, i believe i ran into a total of one baggie with a confederate flag on it as really my most difficult encounter. and, i had to go upstairs to buy it, too, before realizing what i was buying. 99% of the transactions that i carried through with were kids selling produce from somebody's basement; small-scale grow-ups, essentially. while the number of scenarios over the years has been diverse, i would hazard a guess, based on what i've experienced directly, that a numerical majority of the growers i've bought from over the years actually mostly had middle class jobs, and were trying to put away money for retirement. that's your archetypal pot dealer, in real life - it's not a 20 year old black kid in a gang, it's a middle-aged hippie trying to find some way to beat the banks and retire before he dies of lung cancer.

so, i think the justification of fighting marijuana gangs on the black market is essentially a hollywood fantasy; these don't actually exist, in real life. you're actually fighting against a bunch of 60 year old accountants that are trying to pay their over-priced mortgages down.

i have, however, stuck with the legal product for now, because i'm aware that i'm under surveillance. it hasn't been worth the risk, and it probably won't be for quite a while into the future.

but, the quality of the legal pot here is flat out awful, and if you're coming here to explicitly purchase it then you should be embarrassed by yourself. sales have crashed. the accountants are winning.

how was it, though?

i got something called unplug by soleil, as it was advertised in the upper thc range and the lower price range at the same time. the advertising was about relaxing after work, but i didn't really take it very seriously; it was just advertising, whatever, show me the actual data, that's what matters. however, in the end, what i experienced was a lot of "chill" and a lot of "relaxation", which is really not what i'm looking for in marijuana - i want a heavier buzz, and a more aggressive high that is closer, in feeling, to being drunk. i want the marijuana to make me want to get up and dance. so, i think i ultimately found the strain to be too relaxing, for my tastes. i didn't have any of the giggling attacks or moments of deeper reflection that i've associated with previous head caves; i was mostly just unusually relaxed for the last week, which is not at all what i want, and not a drug i'd have much attraction to, in the long run. above all else, i want to strenuously avoid a "couch lock" effect; i want more energy, not less.

in that sense, the last week was largely a waste of time because the pot kind of sucked.

i don't have any intention of delving into the pseudo-science of terpenes any time soon. i did what i was supposed to do, i sought out a high thc and low cbd strain, and it was too much of a relaxing or "pleasant" buzz for my tastes, regardless. what i actually need is a higher thc strain. but, i'm going to figure that out via trial and error, not by wasting time with pseudo-science.

i want to be clear: the pot was not good. too chill, too pleasant; no racing high, no buzz. no laughing or giggling, just a boring and draining "i'm tired" sort of stone. no introspection. and, it made me sleep, which is bad - good pot should actually keep you awake.

i'm hoping the pot is better in michigan, once i'm allowed to go back over again.

so, where'd the day go?

i finished up the last bit of that quarter this morning, and have been sort of vegging ever since - eating a few times, and kind of nodding off beside the laptop, as it's streaming cbc newsworld.

i was also waiting for my batteries to charge before i did a vlog catch-up.

the sleepiness-at-the-end-of-the-quarter is a known phenomenon; it takes a day or two to snap out of it, but the end result is actually an experience of clarity, as you kind of clear the clutter out and start over again. mushrooms are better at this, but i call the biyearly quarter a headcave for a reason; it's a blitz that you wake up from feeling refreshed by. eventually....

i made some coffee around 21:00 and might be able to get through the vlogging catch-up by the morning, when i need to make a lot of calls.

i'm also overdue on a long shower.

so, it might be quiet here for a while longer still, but i'm starting to wake up.

i mentioned a few weeks ago that i intended to go through the lockdown straight-edge, and i do think that that is a reasonable expectation for the rest of this. there were a few things that came together and had me make an unplanned decision for an unplanned headcave. i'm on the other side of it now, hope it helps and want to move on. soon...

right now, i want to stare at the ceiling for a while longer.

so, i'm trying to get a handle on where i need to pick up for the vlogging, and it's going all the way back to february 5th. lol. that's going to take the day, probably.

today's actually a government holiday, right?

i guess all of these calls will need to wait until tomorrow.

hey, this could have been bse, and then we'd all be talking about the insanity of factory farming.

i think that focusing on one specific species, or one culture's utilization of that species, is maybe missing the broader point, which is that the mass industrialization of meat for food produces certain challenges in terms of disease containment. it may be true that regulations around the use of certain animals for food are lacking in china, at this time, and that this is an issue that the rest of the world might want to put some pressure on the chinese to seriously remedy. but, to reduce the issue to a specific practice or a specific species would be to miss the real lesson, here.

in the end, it may be that putting proper controls on the population of bats may be the most efficient way to deal with an illegal harvesting trade that would otherwise have to be stopped with violence; that may be the choice, in the end - to forcibly stop the trade, or to accept defeat before trying, and deal with the source of the disease, instead.

for some animals, it might make sense to introduce domesticated breeding programs under controlled and vaccinated conditions.

but, don't confuse yourself - we'd have the same problems with our high concentrations of farm animals here, if we didn't regulate their care.

so, i've worked my way through enough of april to put it aside and get to the next thing in the list, which is recalibrating the vlogging.

the shows i would have likely made some attempt to go to over the first half of april are:

3rd - dana 
10th - bent knee (in ann arbor, though. maybe not.)
15th - bad religion (but pricey, so probably not.)
16th - squarepusher (for sure. moved to december.)
17th - rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto (for sure. cancelled, for now.)
18th - liturgy (probably not actually)
19th - glitch mob (strongly weather-dependant).

now that i'm caught up, i can multitask. so we're on to the next thing....

i understand that the government created a plan with the intent to sort of put the economy on pause, so that it could just roll over and start back up where it left off; however naively, that was the clear intent, and there were clearly measures introduced to implement that agenda.

but, does the government think it can pay out salaries for the next two years, while it takes in almost no revenue, itself?

i'm reading these reports of businesses that aren't eligible freaking out, and i'm just wondering how the thing is going to maintain itself, let alone how the people that don't qualify are going to fare.

that idea of a pause and restart had to be designed with the assumption that disruption would be short, which contradicts the messaging coming from the government to expect a lengthy disruption, with a staggered return to normalcy.

is the government sure that it wants to insist on trying to freeze the economy, given the expected timeframes?

so, i've built my concert list for april - a little late, but so be it. i'm going to need to sort through that this evening, hopefully enough to mostly catch up.

i've logged into my beyond-repair install one more time, to take a note of installed software and put aside any other user configuration files, as i'm going to be formatting and reinstalling to the laptop's drive, which i'm going to boot into from the pc. so, that's how we'll finish this up.

i need to recalibrate where i am in the vlogging, which could take a night or two.

and, i need to make some calls on monday and get my head around what's actually happening with these court cases.

i'm going to have to then stop for a few days to build a new windows 7 image, which i may also use as the base image for my new computer, which i'm finally nearing a build on. i've had these parts sitting for months...

hopefully, easy access to a fresh image will help in the struggle against whatever force is messing with me.

but, i'm also going to actually physically clean in here. it seems like the effects of the sewer gas have finally mostly faded away, so i'm ready to clean up each of the rooms in here one by one, starting with the room i sleep and type in.

so, there's a list of things to do. step one is sorting through the list of concerts that were cancelled in april, while reimaging my windows 7 laptop, via my now aging 32-bit pc.

so, it seems like i'm caught up, now. thankfully.

i should stay caught up; no more of that.

what's next?

i have some local filing to do, before finally moving to the master document for january.

"did she say that medical care for the coronavirus is creating an observer effect on the measurement of the dead?"

it is the case that a lot of people that get hooked up to these systems are not getting off of them alive.

somebody do a telephone poll. one question, super quick; good agents can get 200 completions an hour for something like this, when everybody is at home bored.

q: do you think you have contracted the coronavirus that causes covid-19?
a: yes or no

get thousands of responses and work it out through brute sampling.

are they peaking or plateauing in new york? well, it depends on the metric.

new cases and new hospitalizations both peaked and dropped quickly. deaths are lagging, and one wonders if it's because the system is able to prolong life in a way that skews the data. if you want some human impact, even if it's just a crude observer effect, then there's something that's potentially real - while a sustained plateau in the death rate would be the expected and intended outcome of social distancing measures in a serious pandemic, it may be that a short plateau, or unclear peak, is the expected result of human health care systems interfering with a natural peak and decline in a relatively weak virus, such as this one.

social distancing isn't supposed to be about a short plateau, it's supposed to be about maintaining a long and rigid plateau, in an attempt to stretch out resources. remember? that was the point - that healthcare systems would be overwhelmed if forced to deal with everything at once, and would be better able to handle the demand if it could be slowed down. but, that implies a sustained level of moderately high demand, for a long period.

given that the other metrics peaked and dropped quickly, it would not appear to be likely that mortality is headed for a sustained plateau in new york, but will rather see an extended peak, followed by a sharp decline.

i could be wrong. we'll see. but, it looks to me like we saw this thing ramp up very quickly to protective immunity in new york and in the process burned itself out, and that what you're going to find when you do testing is that a majority of people already have antibodies.

i'm done with march, now. i'm getting there....soon.....

it looks like i'm going to need to deal with this in the near future.

i'm going to need to schedule a new hearing date by teleconference, it would seem - that is, if the previous date is firmly canceled. i'm hoping that this is not yet the case.

if they are processing motions, then i can file them electronically, it would seem.

it's too late in the day to call, now. let's hope that somebody can answer these questions on monday morning.

https://www.ontariocourts.ca/scj/notice-to-profession-to/#D_Divisional_Court_Matters

so, they made a deal with god, that it would not harm the village in return for a tribute of a fixed number of plays, performed at decadal intervals. how very german.

however amusing this is, i hope that they don't prioritize this bargain with god, or the gods, as being of greater importance than the value of science.

but, it's a reminder that, even in germany, christianity has adopted a great deal of regional traditions. one wonders what pagan ritual this practice ultimately sources from.

https://www.thechronicleherald.ca/news/world/bavarian-towns-17th-century-vow-has-spared-it-from-coronavirus-pastor-says-436244/

press: you're going to have to use the emergency measures act, eventually.
trudeau: we're not doing that.
press: you can't just let this crisis go on without using it.
trudeau: just watch me.

so, is the data in italy beginning to plateau, indicating a so-called flattening of the curve? it's a bit choppy, on first glance, but given the inevitability of deficits in reporting accuracy, it's plateau-y enough, it would appear.

i have two reasons for you to read that data skeptically.

the first is that there are reports of a large amount of uncounted deaths, particularly at nursing homes, during the peak of the crisis a few weeks ago. the delay in counting these deaths might have muted an actual peak. the second is that the actual situation on the ground may be a series of localized peaks, which may appear as a plateau if plotted on top of each other in a way that obscures the overlapping peaks. that might actually explain the choppiness of the data - it's a series of maxima, not just one.

it would be useful to see a couple of different test cases in order to help work through some of these ambiguities in how to interpret the data from italy. i believe that the same concerns exist for spanish data, as well.

i think that the data from north america is likely to continue to be presented in very regionalized contexts, mostly by states and provinces, but also by mayors of large or important jurisdictions. hopefully, the more regionalized presentation of the data will help clarify the second point - it should make it easier to identify whether we're seeing spikes or plateaus, which is a marker to determine if we're suppressing the virus or if it's burning out.

as to the first, it is possible that delays in counting the dead might be better separated from the curve, if it is more localized, as well. but, north american jurisdictions seem to be more aware now, eventually, of the virus' particularly deadly potential inside of these care facilities, and are finally moving to take serious steps to protect these people from this. so, there is also a better likelihood that we'll actually get correct statistics from these homes, when the peak or plateau actually arrives - we might succeed in eliminating this bias by being prepared for it.

i've been distracted by the bad media coverage, again.

there's some upheaval happening, obviously.

i want to try to focus again, now.

i think that health policies that are specifically designed to protect aging professors, many of whom will likely live into their 90s if they can get through this, are justified, actually. that's one of the things that mortifies me most about these stalinists; they're almost eager to wipe out the smart people, they just get in the way. no - we need to protect the brains, we might need them, later.

it may turn out to be more practical in some contexts to introduce more flexible rules around sabbaticals, temporarily.

but, the point is that getting the health response right means understanding the different demographic footprints of covid-19 and influenza, which means letting go of some of the assumptions we have about influenza-like illnesses.

this disease is really a disease of the elderly, and the public health response should be designed to reflect that.

regarding this lancet article, i will acknowledge that the findings are preliminary, and also maybe wonder if they're asking the right research question.

when i suggested that closing schools might be a good idea, what i was mostly concerned about was transmission to older teachers, and, in the post-secondary context, to aging professors. what these preliminary studies seem to be concerned about is the prevalence of the spread amongst the children, rather than the impact that such spread might have on faculty, which is the real concern with this actual virus due to it's different demographic footprint.

see, they based all their studies around influenza, apparently, which has a relatively high mortality rate in very young people, that levels off in early adulthood and kicks back in again with the elderly. especially virulent flu viruses can also target young, healthy people. so, you definitely want to limit the spread of influenza in children, because they're vulnerable to it. this coronavirus that is causing covid-19 appears to have a very low mortality rate in almost everybody under 60; it is really almost exclusively targeting the elderly, although i need to warn that this might drastically change as it sweeps through the midwest. so, if you're looking specifically for the signals associated with influenza in young people, and you conclude that they aren't well-reflected in covid-19 data, you can kind of trick yourself into missing the point, which is that you want to conduct your studies around covid-19 assumptions rather than influenza ones.

so, i'd like to see some more studies done on this, but my immediate reaction is that it is probably right to conclude that shutting down public elementary schools likely did little to prevent spread in the under-60 demographic, even if it hasn't paid enough attention to the more pressing question as to whether opening certain types of schools (like universities, and high schools) may substantively increase the likelihood of older faculty and staff getting infected.

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2352-4642(20)30095-X

there were a few years in the middle of the 90s where i found myself with this absolutely pointless holiday in the middle of the spring (the most nefarious thing about easter is that you never know exactly when it is.) that i barely understood. was jesus a man or a god, and do you dumbasses believe in reincarnation or not...?

i mean, of all the dumb holidays. he died for my sins? really? what an arrogant fucking prick.

i developed a sort of tradition of blaring this through speakers around noon on good friday, because i was bored at home. the tradition is that you take the corpse of your god-man down around 13:00. so, i made sure that it was loud enough that any religious minded person in earshot could hear it, at that time.

i guess that, during the late 90s, i would often disappear on the thursday night to some basement or garage somewhere, to light blunts and play songs, and maybe i'd be back that weekend, and maybe i wouldn't. so, this pointless holiday that i barely understood all of a sudden became an excuse to get stoned for days at a time.

but, when the social media era clicked in, i moved the ritual online and started posting this on facebook every year.

i would encourage you to post this song somewhere today, and across the internet on all days where fictional religious characters of all faiths are said to have died, to the maximum annoyance of all religionists that continue to insist on the inherently sophomoric juvenility and childishness of faith.

today your god is dead,
and noone cares.

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2352-4642(20)30095-X

it appears that dominic raab will become the prime minister on the event of boris johnson dying. they'll need to prorogue parliament, if it isn't already suspended, but the party has been clear on who it is deputizing, and who it will present to the queen, when she calls on the tories to form the next government.

but, how permanent that position is would up to the tories, themselves. they may choose to have a leadership process immediately after the pandemic is over, or might push it for a bit. but, dominic raab will need to win an election for party leader to remain prime minister, and will be expected by everybody to do so as quickly as is feasible.

this is complete nonsense.

the prime minister is not a separate executive office in canada the way that it is in the united states, so the question of "who becomes prime minister if trudeau dies?" is largely incoherent, in form. the prime minister is really just exactly that - the lead minister in the government, which means the leader of the sitting ruling party.

so, there would not be a process to find a new prime minister, there would be a process to find a new leader of the liberal party. this would be a temporary, interim position, due to the inability to launch a leadership process on short notice.

the governor-general would be then called on to invite the leader of the ruling party to form a new government, if there is confidence that they can pass a budget. but, the governor general does not make the choice as to who the leader of the party is, the party does.

so, the first thing that would need to be done would be for the party to name an interim leader, and the second thing that would need to be done would be for the governor-general to invite that interim leader to form a government, if there is confidence that they can pass a budget.

so, would this be a temporary or interim position, then? well, it would be relative to an upcoming leadership process. it's not the unwritten constitutional principles that determine the longevity of the position, it's the internal political processes within the parties, themselves. i suppose that the party might choose to forego a leadership process, or that the elevated candidate may run opposed, but a cabinet member cannot somehow inherit or be donned with party leadership, there needs to be an actual vote.

and, i will repeat that it would be widely expected that anybody that is intending to run for the leadership after the interim period would step down during the selection process, so as to not exert undue influence over it.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6790626/coronavirus-trudeau-prime-minister-sick/

so, i'm not going to spend much time on this, it's the same propaganda we've seen elsewhere, but i just want to make some brief comments about the modelling, which is presented in a little more detail than elsewhere.

first, it should be pointed out that there's a large testing deficit in ontario, and any flattening effects seen on the curve are likely a relic of the fragmented data. if ontario was testing at the rates that quebec is, it would probably have actually found even more cases than quebec, and as ontario is such a large proportion of canada's population, testing lags in ontario will decisively effect the overall numbers. this is data that is known to be suspect, and canada's curve on that graph should be far more linear than is being presented.

second, i want to make a conceptual critique of the modelling in terms of how it understands the way the curves adjust to the different scenarios, or at least suggests that it does via it's use of pictorial aids. maybe i'm just correcting the props; i'd have to look deeper into it to know. the first option, where nothing is done at all, should indeed lead to a ramp up to a 70% infection rate fairly quickly, and then see a rapid drop in cases as the virus is unable to spread further in immune hosts - that's the benefit of herd immunity, and the graphic representation does capture that. however, the pictorial representations of the second and third options, where increasing amount of restrictions are applied, suggest the strict trail off achieved with herd immunity, while attempting to explicitly prevent it. again: i can't be sure what the formulas actually were. but, the pictorial representations of the graph should have had a plateau for the second graph, rather than a peak, and the third option should have had a long and sustained plateau, followed by an eventual trail-off, many months into the future. the reason these plateaus will kick in is that immunity will continue to be rare, and they will essentially stay in place for as long as it takes to actually get to 70%, meaning the number of actual cases is not lower, due to the onset of the sustained plateau.

see, and now we're getting some confusing messaging, then, because the graphical presentation of the data suggests that we can expect this to be over in the same time frame as though we'd done nothing, despite intentionally trying to slow down immunity, thereby stretching out the process.

....except that i actually don't think we're on the third curve. i think we're actually on the first one.

so, this is actually going to be a good signal to determine which model is more reflective of reality. if we see a sustained plateau in the number of deaths, we will know that it's because the effects are slowing the spread - and that it's going to take months to ease up. if we see a continual rise, a peak and sharp drop, we'll know that we had no effect on this thing at all, as it ripped through us at will, and burned itself out.

https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/documents/services/diseases/2019-novel-coronavirus-infection/using-data-modelling-inform-eng.pdf

it may be useful to control the number of bats, actually.

that's probably something the chinese should seriously look into.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/27/opinions/pangolin-coronavirus-pandemic-breiman/

so, what's my take on this?

living on the boundary of the empire may make us sometimes forget what the drawbacks of being behind the limes actually are, and perhaps lull us into a false sense of equivalency with conditions within the empire itself. we are so close to the heart of the empire, and we enjoy so many privileges as a result of it, but we are not within it's borders and there are ramifications of this.

the united states is not historically unique in it's ability to create money at will, this privilege has been enjoyed by other hegemonic states, but it is a rare and powerful privilege that satellite states like canada do not have, in the current financial system. nobody can or will tell the united states how much money to create, or what to do with it. canada, however, is subject to severe levels of discipline through the ratings agency system if it creates money at too great a rate, and these levels of discipline can be quite degrading - we're talking about forced market liberalization of government services, in order to raise equity for the interest payments.

i am an advocate of canadian sovereignty, and because of that, i need to clearly state that canada would be wise to avoid giving these international (but american dominated) bodies like the imf too much of an excuse to involve themselves in our public financing. we want these people to stay far away.

so, i realize that the question of correctly balancing the federal canadian debt load with our ability to generate revenue and our ability to pay down interest, both of which are suffering very badly right now, is in truth of great importance in maintaining our public infrastructure, in the long run.

stated simply: if we fuck up our debt-to-gdp ratio too badly on this, the imf is going to swoop in and privatize everything, which is game over for the country.

this doesn't mean i'm not an advocate of mmt, or that i think deficits actually matter in any serious macroeconomic way. i'm not buying into any of the neo-liberal arguments around this. at all. i'm just pointing out the severity of the disciplinary process. you can disagree with your master intellectually, while realizing the severity of the consequences for disobeying orders.

further, i don't want to make it seem like we should be pushing austerity at this point. being aware of where the limits are means realizing that the country does have a lot of space to play with, and isn't in risk of going bankrupt any time soon.

the reality is that the idea of sending large monthly checks to everybody in a time when revenue is low to non-existent is one that needs to be very carefully analyzed in terms of where it would leave our debt-to-gdp ratio, and because we are a satellite of the empire, we need to abide by the rules in place for satellite states, rather than the rules in place for the empire itself.

for that reason, i would support an immediate ubi in the united states, even as i call for careful budgeting in canada.

i'm not discounting the possibility that the ubi may emerge as the most effective method. one argument that i've seen david graeber promote repeatedly is that the government will actually save money by getting rid of the costly bureaucracy around needs-testing; i don't want to make guesses or reason through this, i want to see somebody actually do the math, and i don't have access to the stats, myself. this is a claim, and it may be true in specific contexts, but i'll let the experts tell me - how much is it costing to administer the program, and are there cost savings attached to administering the program, rather than handing out universal checks?

one of the arguments i've heard directly from the government is that some workers could be getting closer to $4,000/month under the emergency benefit, so moving to a flat benefit would lead to them getting less money, which could be catastrophic if they, for example, have children, or rent that is close to or higher than $2,000/month. the marxist in me wants to ensure that these people get what they need, and, in this case, it would be more than the amount being floated around; a ubi, in context, would have to be closer to $5,000/month to be implementable, and then there's little question that there are cost-savings in running the bureaucracy.

a more pertinent question may be whether a ubi-like payment may be the more efficient way to reach people that don't qualify, in addition to the programs that have been set up. if they just gave everybody below some poverty line ($20,000?) a $2000/month monthly check for however long this lasts, that may be more cost-effective than setting up additional programs, and the total payout may be manageable in the broader context. some people might get a little more than they need, but these will be people with very little, to begin with.

what i want them to do is actually find the right numbers and do the right calculations and see what the correct deductions are.

but, if they do this, please realize that the most likely outcome is an additional bursary program in addition to the existing payout schemes, and not something to replace it - it's not just the poor that are getting hit, it's also people with mortgages and salaried jobs, and they can't pay their bills on $2000.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-what-if-cras-emergency-response-benefit-amid-pandemic-is-a-mistake/

so, it looks like some places are actually going to peak this week, which is more in line with my own projections.

we have an open question in front of us - has the transmission rate reduced because we've successfully reduced the spread during lockdown, or is the virus in truth running completely rampant and beyond our control, and actually burning out due to running up against herd immunity? we will need to see which hypothesis better fits the data, now. the health services aren't going to do that, but i will.

the various governments have given you their projections, in order to back up their argument for social distancing. this is generally done by fitting the curve to data in various existing jurisdictions, which introduces all of the specific bias in the various individual systems. this isn't an approach to determine the actual mortality rate via analysis and separation of the data, but rather an attempt to gather as many possible outcomes as possible, in order to create a set of bounds. in this thinking, the best case scenario is the best dataset we have, and the worst case scenario is the worst dataset we have - and careful analyses of biases in each of these specific data sets can happen later.

i think it's fair to state that everybody realizes that all of the data undercounts the number of mild cases, and consequently exaggerates the mortality rate. "canada's data will show those same biases", you say - and you're clearly correct, but that bias will appear in undocumented cases, not in exaggerated deaths.

i am going to rather construct a range of data by performing three simple calculations. this is my very basic model:

1) min range = [total population]*[66.66% infection rate, that is herd immunity]*[0.001]

2) average range = [total population]*[66.66% infection rate, that is herd immunity]*[0.003]

3) maximum range = [total population]*[66.66% infection rate, that is herd immunity]*[0.005]

you can do these calculations yourself, they're easy enough.

herd immunity levels should be empirically determined, not assumed, but the situation is not ideal. so, that's a source of error. some areas that lack resources and get overwhelmed may see numbers closer to the maximum range, which in north america would probably be a statement that relates better to the obese midwestern united states than the relatively healthy coasts, and the comparably fit & athletic canada.

if the data is better fit by my model than the official models, we should conclude that we are not experiencing disruptions in transmission at all, but have pretty much already all got it; that the reason hospitalization rates are going down is that we actually achieved herd immunity exceedingly quickly, despite our best efforts to prevent it. such a realization should have drastic implications for future public health policy.

what are my number of projected deaths in....

1) new york city: (5799, 17398, 28997)  [projection: low end]

2) gta:  (4133, 12399, 20665)   [projection: low end]

3) montreal: (2800, 8399, 13999) [projection: low end]

4) detroit (metro area): (2866, 8599, 14332) [projection: expect something more like the middle number, due to higher comorbidity]

as you know, i've been leaning towards the low side of the calculation, but let's be rigorous here.

and, lets see where the numbers fall.