March 2024

Sentinel testing and wastewater seem to be the best we can do for infection numbers now. And they both tell the same story, a pandemic continuing with merry abandon, while we normalise all of these infections behind the political (medical) framing of level of disease. /2 https://t.co/WtLrDZaerh

The sentinel testing for example suggests a worsening pandemic, not an improvement, between 2023 and 2024. Again I refuse to budge from the most obvious fact, that pandemics are defined by number of INFECTIONS. Not the point-in time severity of disease these infections cause. /3 https://t.co/WmRMtJ6m0f

The baseline of infections hasn’t really budged in a year, if anything it’s increased, particularly as RAT-reporting ended already in September 2023, and infections we know about *increased* since that time. Many will have been missed, and infections still trended up. /4 https://t.co/wOhkElCRbX

Compare with the flu, showing its clear seasonal pattern. Covid is nothing like it at all, it’s an infection carnival, year-round. Covid minimisers hate analogies because it brings to the for how absolutely ridiculous this situation is. But imagine this was car accidents. /5 https://t.co/81Oz5wOnqn

Where the number of accidents grew and grew, and sat at very high levels all year, but fewer people died because of better car technology. Would that be an acceptable situation? Of course not, the Covid situation is Orwellian and ludicrous. /6

Pandemics are defined by number of infections because it’s the rate of infection that kills, widely and across long time scales. Not the point-in-time acute morbidity or mortality. The definition also recognises that rampant infection allows pathogens to evolve. /7

Evolve to evade immunity. Basic evolutionary biology. Hijacked in this pandemic by a libertarian politics which thinks titrating severe disease to available hospital beds is public health. Mass, continuous sickness and disease, across the entire population. /end

Famously smallpox is the only human disease that’s ever been eradicated. But there’s more to that story than is often told. For example as you can see in this image, it was as good as eradicated in richer countries decades before the official eradication effort even began. /2 https://t.co/xGeDfkmG9V

This is just one way Covid minimisers are dishonest. Earlier in this pandemic there was much debate about the difference between disease elimination, and disease eradication. Elimination of spread in a community is what we do for many other pathogens already. /3

Through continuous public health action, monitoring for outbreaks, controlling those outbreaks using a range of measures, to prevent the pathogen achieving wide spread in a community. What’s not said enough is that this really IS effectively a type of eradication. /4

For those countries who eliminated smallpox early in the 20th century, for residents of those countries smallpox was eradicated in all but name. Nobody was really catching it, in any meaningful or notable numbers. You could live as if it didn’t exist. /5 https://t.co/uPNuhERBxr

This was what living with Covid was like in counties like Australia and New Zealand, earlier in the pandemic, when community spread was wiped out. Again in all but name, Covid was eradicated for people in those counties. You could live a normal life, without infection. /6 https://t.co/sWJA6zrGnf

This is disease elimination - the disease’s spread was controlled, preventing widespread community infection. Inside that red oval. But again, for the purposes of daily life, it’s effectively the eradication of that pathogen, *for those communities*. /7 https://t.co/E6SHFT5ioW

Now of course Infinite Covids will jump up and down here and say it’s only because we ‘locked down’ those communities for 2 years. Which is just more politicised fantasy, if you lived in these communities you know that’s hyperbolic nonsense. /8

Yes some activities were strictly controlled, such as international flights, and there were short periods of the shutting down of much community activity, but for most of the time people lived normal lives. /9

This was exactly how rich countries were living with smallpox for nearly a century before it was eradicated. Nobody in those countries was frothing at the mouth about how ‘you can’t eradicate smallpox’, and welcoming smallpox back into their communities. /10 https://t.co/liAn4tVPSa

They were delighted to be free of it, for it not to be in their lives any more. This is the important point - disease eradication IS a global process. But the *elimination* of disease from individual territories was effectively eradication, for those territories. /11

The only difference global eradication made for those territories was the opportunity to cease all public health action for smallpox, which was continued all through those decades, to maintain disease elimination. This is THE critical point. /12

Disease elimination i.e. control of community spread of any pathogen, IS effectively disease eradication, *for that community*. Public health methods, continuously applied. creates effective eradication of an infectious threat, for a community. /13

And it’s what we do for EVERY serious infectious disease, except smallpox, to this day. It’s why we live without getting infected with most serious infectious diseases, in rich countries. It’s disingenuous to say we should do nothing for Covid because it can’t be eradicated. /14

We should do with Covid what we do for every other serious infectious disease that hasn’t been eradicated. We should control it. Stop it spreading in the community. Many are not even aware of this herculean annual effort from public health people. /15

To maintain effective eradication of serious infectious disease from our lives. Your local garbage collection and water and wastewater treatment plants are part of that whole infrastructure. All ongoing public health interventions. /16

It’s the invisibility of much of this work that makes so many prey to dumb slogans about ‘living with’ Covid. Their entire lives thousands of people have worked day and night to prevent them living with other serious infectious diseases. Covid is not anything new there. /17

It was just one more disease to create an effective control guideline for, to be implemented in an ongoing way, to prevent community transmission. Public health business as usual. Until the politics of populism swept the public health systems to one side. /18

Historically this also goes to something else I Tweet about. The only reason the world pushed ahead with smallpox eradication, which many at the time described as impossible, was the creation of a post-WW2 *institution*. The WHO. I often Tweet about that period. /19

When the total catastrophe of two world wars and the Spanish Flu left countries completely broken, incapable of functioning. This was when ‘the public’ was truly created and implemented, by global institutions designed by these societies, to save societies. /20

And why we then had 70 years of unprecedented wealth and health, globally, as these institutions acted. The same institutions the populist libertarian politics of the late 1970s until today has been dismantling with relish. Describing them as ‘red tape’, as ‘bureaucracies’. /21

Supposedly impinging upon the freedoms of individuals in fantasy free markets. Why we now have the ludicrous situation of the uncontrolled spread of a serious disease that has killed millions being described as a return to ‘normal life’. /22

It’s this sociopathic politics that not only prolonged Covid into an ongoing pandemic, but actually created the pandemic in the first place. If the richer nations had done as Oz and NZ did, early in the pandemic, it would never have occurred. /23

We’d have all had a relatively short period of disease control, followed by a return to a normal life, free of this new infection. Instead places like the US and UK, the vanguard of the global populist libertarian movement, created breeding grounds for Covid. /24

Which meant countries who had followed basic public health procedures and controlled Covid to the point of elimination, quickly, were then faced with the impossible decision of what to do with this mass of infected people overseas, in a global community that mixed freely. /end

This seemed a key passage. “An inoculation that guards marvellously well against disease — offering as much protection as it can — can still end an outbreak.” BUT, see the underlining — you have to control spread too, or the immune system will be overwhelmed. 2/2 https://t.co/Zv8u0kZhij

h/t @pondero60943260

The team sports of this pandemic created an idiot fake battle between vaccination, and controls on disease transmission (NPIs). But vaccination also ends epidemics by restricting transmission. By lowering viral load so that a host is much less likely to transmit infection. /2

It’s possible that no vaccine is ‘sterilising’. But that’s also likely not how vaccines stop disease outbreaks, by making individuals super-immune, to resist infection. But rather by dropping the viral load in the *infected* just enough to prevent them infecting many others. /3

Meaning everything is about transmission, not immunity. Immunity, usually only partial, plays the role of reducing viral load, thus slowing transmission to others. Not of setting up some sort of barrier to infection of individuals (though it does that as well). /4

Vaccines absolutely do protect individuals, from disease and sometimes even infection. But that’s not the main way they prevent spread i.e. epidemics and pandemics. They do that by targeting transmission. The vaccination/control spread battle is fake and ridiculous. /5

Epidemics and pandemics are stopped by preventing or slowing transmission. There’s no binary here. NPIs and vaccines both target that same essential requirement. Using vaccines alone won’t do it. We need everything that can slow transmission. /end

Community is not something that sits alongside work. Work is a dominant venue for community life. But an economy says ‘go to where the jobs are’. It has zero care for actual physical community, the whole function of an economy is to delocalise. FIFO. And social media? /2

No doubt people connect there, I do too. But does it translate into the actual physical communities inside which we all actually live? Every community I observe is being torn apart by interest groups, who mobilise on social media. The righteousness is scary to watch. /3

While communities crumble, these interest groups bully, harass, obstruct, all because to them their cause is sacrosanct. To hell with a functioning community, their ‘team’ has to win. *That’s* what overflows into actual community life. Vicious, zealous zombies. /4

As our actual collective mechanisms have been dismantled, people have re-grouped around isolated issues, which they then inject with all of the anger deriving from their dismantled community lives. Team sports, like I always say. Only the team winning matters. /5

Why we can’t even fight a pandemic. Because every even tiny practical methodology, used for generations to fight infectious disease, is immediately turned into a new game of team sports. A fake binary, with a team on either end of the binary. Masks or no-masks. Etc. /6

Now the assault is on, on working from home. Because the thing the economy can never allow is any sort of meaningful sense of territory. Of home. That gets in the way of the great delocalisation, the mobilisation of people and resources. More community smashing. /7

People get up and seriously say that without going to work, people have no life and are at risk of poor physical and mental health. What does that say about the communities in which they live? Destroyed, by the economy. And work doesn’t give a shit. /8

At best you may get referral to an EAP. As if there’s something wrong with you. None of this is capitalism or neoliberalism or all those big juicy -ism words. It’s much simpler, it’s the absence of basic community. People who grow up without one reproduce that absence. /9

It’s all they know. They reproduce the only social structure they know. High school. Popularity-driven social status. That’s our life now, in this fantasy fiction we call an economy. /end

Zooming out gives a little more perspective. Certainly an improvement from the Omicron peaks. But only recently lower infection rates than the original Wuhan-strain waves. And as with the Omicron waves, no indication yet if it’s just an epidemic pattern, rather than decline. /2 https://t.co/yhfxVNQjMQ

Christina Pagel posted these, together with commentary. This together with declining hospitalisations there, both over their winter, will give support to the ideas of hybrid immunity. But again could also just be an entrenched epidemic infection pattern. /end https://t.co/Qa95UMAGS2

I saw this article by chance yesterday, and it’s a very common problem kids and their parents face. Trying to ‘fit in’ to social life. Notice the assumption here, also common, that what’s important IS to fit in. /2 https://t.co/Vz6TZ6qMyg https://t.co/6FlAIW0ESh

The assumption that social life is the normal life that all of us need to find a way to fit into. Even further, and we see a lot of this rhetoric in the anti-lockdown believers, the idea that without that social life, peoples’ health (mental and physical) will become damaged. /3

Like ‘the economy’, all of these ideas have been said by so many for so long, that they’re seen as reality itself, unchallenged. But social life is THE most brutal part of being human. The image of it as the nourishing context for our lives is fundamentally wrong. /4

So wrong, that in reality these articles should be about how to help kids to free themselves from the demands and pressures of social life, to allow their individual selves to develop and flourish. Of course we all need to associate, at all ages. To live and work together. /5

But it’s a much bigger and wrong claim that this association is vital to our individual psychological and emotional well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth, nothing is more damaging to that well-being. Our social lives are functional. /6

We need to work together on things, to have lives that are easier, through distribution of effort. To make our *individual* lives easier and better. This is the fake binary the libertarians forced upon us. Between individual freedom and collective effort. /7

Humans only ever were individual, through collective mechanisms. Without that collective life, individual life is just toil, subsistence. There’s no binary here. Collective life created individual freedom. But none of this is about our emotional and psychological well-being. /8

That social, collective life is the most challenging thing for emotional and psychological life. A brutal imitative rivalry. Imitation is how individuals act in collective ways, and they imitate what they perceive as having high status, which creates social hierarchies. /9

We call it ‘peer pressure’ for kids, but the same mechanism operates throughout life. It’s why for example we’re doing nothing against Covid, because our high-status individuals are doing nothing, so that doing nothing is what others then imitate. /10

They do what everybody else is doing, they imitate them, because otherwise they violate the social status hierarchy. They no longer ‘fit in’. Scratch the surface though of most people doing this imitation, and you won’t find people happy to ‘live with’ Covid. /11

They fear it. They fear those infected with it. But that fear isn’t strong enough to overcome the social status hierarchy. Nothing is. People will rather die than not fit in. We’re social animals, that’s our most fundamental behaviour. /12

If you’ve ever taught in schools, or had kids, you’ll have seen just how brutal this social world is. How many kids are ruined by the endless need to fit in. That need is important for work, for getting things done, collectively. It’s a disaster for everything else. /13

For the kids’ emotional and psychological well-being. Having to constantly negotiate the social status hierarchies, to fit in and feel validated, as an individual. Paul McCartney made the insightful comment about fame, that it’s really about feeling validated. /14

That it’s about being ‘recognised’ (literally) as worthy for who you are and what you do. Affirmation that whatever you is, is affirmed by others. You can see how all of our adult problems are the same problems kids work through every day. /15

And how we give fancy grown-up political names to these social mechanisms, like Left and Right and capitalism and whatever, when in reality people are still playing the same social games they did growing up, at school. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are gangs, like groups at school. /16

Teams you can add your allegiance to, so you fit in. The only way human societies have ever escaped these social games is when catastrophes befall them of a magnitude that disrupts or even destroys social hierarchies. Like the Spanish Flu, WW1 and WW2, in the 20th century. /17

Those catastrophes in quick succession broke the hierarchies. And led to the development of the only thing that makes us all act differently. Institutions. Really just expertise-based social activities that transcend individual lifespans. /18

Only institutions can ignore the need to always fit in. Their focus is not the present-day, it’s historical continuity, things like plans and enacting those plans. And if you work in institutions you know imitation social games do all they can to disrupt that basic task too. /19

Get too far from catastrophes, and those games of imitative rivalry will reassert themselves, destroying institutions from within. That’s what we’re living right now. Institutions sidelined, while populist imitative hierarchies reassume control. The world of Trump. /20

If you have kids or know some who struggle with fitting in, I think it’s worth remembering that the real problem of any life is the opposite. It’s how NOT to fit in. To assert your individual self, to allow it to be what it is. As free as possible from imitative rivalry. /end

Heterologous immunity is a sleeper possibility I think. Get every vaccine you qualify for, for any disease. Also so refreshing to see a recognition that the pandemic ‘curve’ needs to decline.

@DavidJoffe64 @ejustin46 I find heterologous immunity fascinating.

Fatalism is an adolescent view of the world, ‘shit happens’. Because for teenagers, shit really does happen, and they have very little agency in avoiding it. Society is a high school, political libertarianism is just high school culture translated into adult life. /2

‘Freedom’ to do what you like - teenagers, anyone? - all restriction seen as oppression etc. A shrug when terrible consequences ensure, fatalism, because again adolescents have little agency in problems. ‘Living with’ Covid deliberately tapped into this cultural shift. /3

Social media magnifies this shift exponentially, it turns the entire adult world into a high school on steroids. Every issue transformed into a team sport debating game, allowing people to ‘mobilise’ into teams or groups, to oppose other teams. Pure school playground. /4

There is no more circle of life, each life stage with its particular focus and role. Just an eternal lifestyle present, ‘living your best life’, to hell with tradition or the future. Only the present matters. And having ‘fun’ in that present. h/t @Eerrnn for the link. /end

The problem with immunity for me is that the closer you get to understanding it, the more elusive it gets. I think it’s not unfair to say that the most common public perception, but often also expert perception of it, is as a property of an individual. /2

A level of activation of an individual’s immune system, against a particular pathogen. This has never sat comfortably with me, because in its essence the immune system itself seems an open system, continuously shaped by encounters with the world outside an individual. /3

It’s an ecological space, a place of encounters between organisms and their associated microbes with the microbes that surround them. Even concepts like herd or hybrid immunity, which seem more open to this ecological interaction between individuals, don’t seem quite right. /4

Those concepts still heavily rely upon an idea of individuals and their immune systems, and if you just add up lots of them they can sometimes prevent infections from spreading. There’s not the sense of immunity more generally being an ecological relationship *between* them. /5

I did find the field of ecoimmunology which does take a more ecological approach. Though the basis of the field seems to be trying to understand individual variations in immunity, so still maybe grounded in individuals and their immune systems. /6 https://t.co/9sT519F7LF(Fig.

I liked that this field at least has a broader understanding of an immune response, stretching across multiple systems of the body, and also out into the ecological relationships between organisms. And its recognition of immunity as a last line of defence. /7

Which if used as a front line of attack risks autoimmune responses from the organism. Which goes healthily against the approach we’re taking with Covid, of trying to use immunity as a magic airbag of protection. But when you zoom out from all of this, I think it gets simpler. /8

Looking at ‘sterilising’ vaccines, and that they mostly don’t offer magic sterilisation but just reduce viral load so much that transmission is significantly reduced, it struck me that immunity and prevention of infection are actually the same thing. /9

That instead of seeing immunity as a way to buffer us from pathogens, it’s more accurate to see it as just one more way we prevent those pathogens from infecting us in the first place. Like a fire alarm in a building, not there to stop fires but to keep us away from them. /10

The older idea of ‘immunocompetence’, as some level of protection against a pathogen, misses this wider networked picture of a much more vital avoidance of infection. A medieval city that lifted the drawbridge and hoped the castle walls and moat would keep the invaders out…/11

…was using its last line of defence against invaders. The ultimate aim was always the same, to keep invaders out of that city or society. Not to live with the invaders, while safe behind walls and moats. This is the subtle but profound shift in framework I see with immunity. /12

We’ve pulled it out of its networked, ecological context and made it into something that it isn’t. It always was just one more networked way to repel invaders, to keep them OUT of us. Not a way to help us live with them. The point of ‘hybrid immunity’ for example? /13

It isn’t to make each individual just immune enough to live with repeated infections. It’s to make enough individuals immune enough that they stop spreading the infection to others, so that again the ultimate aim is to *prevent infection*. To keep the invaders out. /14

Putting to one side that many probably rightly believe hybrid immunity is a fantasy for Covid anyway, because of the nature of the virus and its uncontrolled spread. The concept of immunity itself has been isolated from its wider origin and function. /15

We don’t so much vaccinate to prevent individuals ever getting sick, or rather we do, but not by building them immune walls, drawbridges and moats. Vaccines boost that last line of defence, that’s all. /16

We need the front line of attack to be stopping the invaders ever reaching the walls of the castle in the first place. The whole game is the prevention of infection, immunity is one part of that single (not binary) process. /end

‘The economy’ is a construct. A replacement for society. No conspiracies, the people who invented it SAID ‘there is no such thing as society’. It’s not some objective infrastructure underlying societies. It’s just society, re-branded. /2

You don’t need to run your economy to be able to afford to do social things. That’s the framing that lets it win. Your economy IS already social things. Work is a social thing. This isn’t two domains of reality. It’s just one. /3

Things like economic growth happen when you have educated and healthy people, drinking clean water and healthy food. It’s outrageously stupid to see this as some separate thing to ‘the economy’. They’re the same thing. People don’t like it when I say the economy is a fiction. /4

Because they mistake the presence of economIC transactions, like trade, for ‘the economy’. That’s the con. Economic transactions are social transactions. There is no ‘economy’ they sit inside. They happen IN society. Humans have always done economic things. /5

But economic things are social things. They don’t happen in an economy, this fiction invented as a substitute for society. They happen in society. People do them, acting socially. There’s no binary here. You don’t run your economy alongside society. /6

Just as you don’t run an economy alongside people getting Covid. Those people ARE the bloody economy. It’s just society. So why is the middle class doomed? Because the people who invented the idea of the economy represent history’s dominant social form. Feudalism. /7

It was their way of reversing the great shift to public-focused governance post-WW2. The shift that took authority and wealth from generational privilege, in rich families, to fund the war effort. They never forgave that shift. They mobilised to reverse it. /8

That’s been the entire ‘free market’ project since the 1970s. They don’t actually believe in free markets, that was an idiot idea a few economists held which these privileged groups in society latched onto as a Trojan Horse. None of them act as if free markets exist. /9

They live in a world of cronyism, jobs for the boys, networks of privilege through private schooling and other social mechanisms. But they saw straight away that the idea of a free market was a way to smash public-focused governance. To paint that as a restriction on freedom. /10

The middle classes always were the institutional home of modern life. The professional classes, actually running the country. They’re doomed in an economy. And that’s what we’re living right now. /end

Reality is now just fodder for this hypersocial process. It's not the devices that are addictive, it's the imitative rivalry they afford. We're hyper-social now, sociality on steroids. What's important isn't going to the gig or travel location. 2/5

It's feeding it into the socials, via the phone (preferably in real-time), to say 'here I am, at X'. Imitative rivalry. Most of our political events now are confected in this same way. The socials create some semi-hysteria using some political actor or event as fodder. 3/5

The political actors and commentators react to this, also on the socials, in that continuous feedback way, back-and-forth, creating an escalating spiral. A vortex of self-referentiality. Humanity is now stuck inside these self-referential social bubbles. 4/5

Mistaking them for reality itself. Reality has been hijacked to feed social imitative rivalry, a perpetual game to gain social status, then imitated by others, who want to share in that status. Endless team sports, between rival teams vying for status. 5/5

Because that’s the loss I think people are feeling. The sense that somebody, somewhere, is taking care of shit that happens. Now it all just seems to happen, and nothing is done. And ‘personal responsibility’ seems an obviously ludicrous response. /2

What can an individual do when faced with these massive problems? For starters I think it helps to see that only the most privileged people in the world tend to frame things this way. Us here in the West, mostly. /3

Individuals facing impossible challenges is pretty much how most of the world has always lived, forever. So in that way what we’re experiencing right now is us coming back to the pack a bit. A correction of sorts after many decades of glorious holiday from existential threat. /4

A holiday created mostly after World War II, when Western societies built public institutions to manage most of those existential threats. Institutions which the politics of the last 70 years has relished dismantling again. I won’t revisit that history again here. /5

At the same time though I think it helps to understand that people who have been excluded from this existential holiday don’t conceive the world in this same way. They don’t frame things as individuals facing existential threats. Privilege creates that individual viewpoint. /6

The anger and frustration we feel and express here about inaction on critical things stems *from* previous action on those things. We were used to somebody taking care of business, and we’re angry that they’re not, any more. /7

The political libertarians actually celebrate this as a return as they see it of personal responsibility, rejecting the Nanny State. Except they live the most privileged lives of all, the name gives it away (only the privileged have nannies). /8

They live their whole lives freeloading off the work of others, and passing responsibility for their failings to other people. They’re the ultimate ‘let them eat cake’ people, living comfortable lives that they think happen all by themselves. /9

I think it’s important to understand that individual and collective never were two things. I’ve used the example of solar panels a few times to show that. How putting them on your house is an individual and collective act, at the same time. /10

And I posted a few times about how tabloid media really understands this, how its focus on specific cases takes an issue and collapses the distinction between individual and collective. The collective meaning or message from a tabloid headline IS the individual case shown. /11

It individualises the universal. The universal *is* individual. The law knows this too, every case can set a universal precedent, even if incredibly individual and specific. The poor and powerless are more likely to see the shit that happens in life as a universal thing. /12 https://t.co/F0xLh3llsE

Not as an individual thing. Not as ‘why isn’t anybody fixing this for me?’ But as ‘shit happens’. It’s been their universal existence, forever. It’s not a great thing to have as a universal experience, obviously, but how we frame these things matters. /13

We need a much more realistic appetite for shit than one that has us yelling into the void every day demanding that somebody fix it. What fixed it in the past was so much shit happening, that societies collapsed and emergency institutions were created to fix them. /14

That fixing process never was ‘mobilising’ lots of people to fix it. ‘Building awareness’. Protesting. All that relies upon a stupid conception of democracy, as built from the ‘bottom up’. It never was, it’s a con. It was emergency action, in the face of social collapse. /15

The ‘public’ was created by those emergency institutions. Not by politicians, and absolutely not by voting. Those are just team sports games we all love, which we played while wallowing in our existential holiday from threats. The time is now here to become universal again. /16

To think and act universally, *as* an individual. To stop separating those two things. I still believe the single greatest way any of us can change *all* of our problems, at once, is by putting solar panels on our roofs. Energy is the lynchpin of our societies. /17

The energy industry drives political opposition to all the things we want fixed, including Covid. Your solar can really fuck them up. You don’t need to mobilise people, just get an installer in and within 2 days you’ll be sticking it to the man. /18

And in everything else you do, ‘go viral’, just another way of recognising that individual action is also global action. Find a way to tell your individual story that makes it a universal story. That’s what takes anger to scale, conservatives know it. They invented tabloids. /end

Like the fiction of ‘the economy’ more generally, the budget surplus framing was invented to bed down a permanent removal of public investment. As the MMT theorists point out, it’s a ridiculous idea derived from comparing national and household budgets. /2

A government surplus is a country starved of public investment. The same sloganeers are aware of that, they long ago replaced the idea of investment with ‘spending’, tapping into that same idea of rationing your (household) money. All designed to shut down public investment. /3

In the 20th century, reality showed the lie of all of this. In the first half of that century, governments spent big. It led to the ‘golden age of capitalism’ in the second half of the century. Decades of unprecedented prosperity. You have to spend money, to make money. /4 https://t.co/vWBO47Hga6

You have to INVEST. Investment leads to growth. Starving a country of investment by painting it as ‘spending’ means it goes nowhere. Nothing gets built, economic activity wallows in get-rich-quick schemes with widespread public poverty. And something even more important. /5

I’ve Tweeted before that what promotes investment is NEED. Social need. The Industrial Revolution wasn’t ‘capitalism’ or machinery. It was the liberation of humans from millennia of need. All of those machines were put to work to target that need. /6 https://t.co/2wbI0FvxAN

That revolution is now over 2 centuries ago. We’ve moved on, we have NEW needs now. Desperate needs. Climate change, a pandemic left uncontrolled, environmental degradation. Ageing societies with no workers. Etc. These needs should be triggering the next industrial revolution. /7

The huge money to be made from renewables, just for starters. There’s no conflict here between getting rich and addressing social need, that’s our modern perversion, to paint those as opposites. The people who got rich in the Industrial Revolution were making lives better. /8

But we’re wallowing in these ridiculous framings about surpluses and debt and ‘markets’. As if this fictitious market will fix all of these things by itself. Bullshit. The idea of markets was invented to entrench the holders of the wealth from the last Industrial Revolution. /9

What we now call the ‘fossil fuel industry’. Milking a revolution now more than 250-years-old, addressing needs long gone. They’re blocking the next Industrial Revolution, the one addressing today’s needs. Government needs to lead, to invest. /10

Not to act like accountants from a Kafka novel, counting the pennies so they get good optics for the news cycle about surpluses. They need to start bloody building things again. /end

https://t.co/kQlsPSDsqg

Firms centralise to create economies of scale, or efficiency as the cartoon says. Vertical integration is one example, where firms take control over their supply, manufacturing *and* distribution, to be able to control the entire product flow. /2

This is how BYD for example is now disrupting the car industry. It’s reported to make everything in its cars, except the tyres and windows. It’s not dependent on suppliers or distributors, it does it all itself, which allows it to control costs through economies of scale. /3 https://t.co/5vVwMjdb1l

This is where the ridiculous fantasies of modern economics always come unstuck. At the same time it runs narratives about how ‘competition’ will keep prices down for consumers, and ‘monopolies’ keep prices high. Here in Oz the Coles/Woolies duopoly debates are this. /4

Rarely noticed is that all sides converge on this idea. Those evil monopolies and duopolies! It’s goodies and baddies for grown-ups. In actual reality, firms do this to try to reduce costs for consumers. /5 https://t.co/ThNsu0RU2l https://t.co/vBG7PHKzEQ

Coles and Woolies for example are just following the lead *of* competitors like Aldi, they’re becoming more vertically integrated. They’re controlling their supply chains. Competition did this, it produced monopoly behaviour. Because prices come down with economies of scale. /6

The very thing the laughable narratives of modern economics say are bad, basically anything that produces scale and *reduces* competition, is what creates economies of scale and lower costs for consumers. It’s THE most basic logistics. /7

If you can control and coordinate all aspects of your business, you’re able to do it more efficiently and therefore more cheaply. The same principle is applied in healthcare. ‘Single payer’ systems like Medicare keep costs down. Economies of scale. https://t.co/4gzUX5K41J /8 https://t.co/QDG3cvJrux

Medicare works BECAUSE it’s a monopoly. It’s much more efficient. The alternative competition model of health care through private provision and insurance *always* suffers from runaway cost blowouts. I said originally that all of this is a social process. /9

As I Tweet about a lot, humans are social creatures, in everything they do. Economies of scale is a manifestation of that. If your supply chain is a whole series of independent companies (teams in a social sense), then each one of those teams will ‘compete’ for status. /10

For success. With all of the others. Each will look to get the best outcome, for its team. It’s hilarious we think this is the way to be more efficient and drive costs down. Instead it does the opposite. Each team/firm looks to maximise its return, to itself. /11

Exactly what we see with private health. The insurers want to maximise profits, healthcare providers want to do the same. The price of everything goes up. It’s only when you coordinate all of it in a single-payer way, that those status games are bypassed. /12

Similarly we see this in politics every day. The political libertarians, who are determined to pulverise all collective mechanisms and return ultimate sovereign power to individuals, instead create the greatest swarming mobs of obedient cult behaviour of all. /13 https://t.co/GRn5bP5CBB

Humans will ALWAYS create hierarchies, they will assemble around higher-status individuals and ideas. Logistically it’s much more efficient, and more fundamentally it’s a lie that humans like diversity. They desire nothing more than unified belief. /14

Australians still bank predominantly with the ‘Big 4’, because they like all people hate having to constantly calculate and negotiate the ‘best deal’, which the economic propaganda says is best for them. They just want it taken care of, to not HAVE to think about it. /15

Not because they’re lemmings, but because they have other things to do, a life to enjoy without having to constantly figure out what is best and safest for them. Something not said enough in the Coles/Woolies debate is that Australians shop with them because they LIKE to. /16

Cheaper alternatives like Aldi have been there for years. Australians don’t care. Socially, humans like scale, they like unified belief and activity, and logistically that’s also better for everybody. It’s not scale that puts prices up, it’s the refusal to *regulate* scale. /17

They also love imitative rivalry. We get duopolies because that’s team sports, which we love more than anything. That’s the status game. Coles/Woolies is retail State of Origin. If we ignore these basic social behaviours, we’ll never understand why we get things wrong. /18

Take away scale and humans will always re-create it somewhere else. We removed monarchies, so humans reinvented them. We centralise because socially we love status hierarchies. This can cause bottlenecks only when those social status games get in the way of the logistics. /18 https://t.co/9MGde7TYI6

There’s no way to resolve that tension, that tension IS human history. Humans run on desire, all of our societies/economies are really the continuous play of desires. Never stable, always fracturing as new desires and their social statuses disrupt others. /end

The economy never was about ordinary people. It was about taking a set of indicators that favour the existing status quo, and reifying them into a thing, then used as a substitute for society. The ‘cost of living crisis’ reveals the same shift. /2 https://t.co/FbQbcRuunZ

Ordinary people were only ever granted access to the society we call an economy by taking out vast amounts of personal debt. It’s the crippling weight of that debt, accelerated by increasing interest rates, that’s revealed how the shift works. /3 https://t.co/VPOkVoqc2w

As soon as that debt became both unavailable and unpayable, ordinary people discovered their true place in our society. Nowhere. They’re living in cars, and/or eating breakfast cereal 3 times a day. /4 https://t.co/eU7nDDzNni

This isn’t ‘capitalism’ or any of the other popular baddies we evoke because it makes us feel better. It’s a social transformation, of a community-focused society, into a market-focused society. Markets are individuals, not communities. /5

Individuals kept in play in this new society only by debt. Debt funded to fuel the social status hierarchies which are most human behaviour. The best house, the best car, in the best suburb, using the best phone and wearing the best watch, etc. /6

The economy is a direct threat to all societies, because its core tenets are ruthlessly anti-social. It’s a social invention, not an economic one, barely a century or so old. /end Graph from: https://t.co/hJgyauMQUl

Groups simply don't have agency. Not because it's denied them, but because there is no such thing as a group mind. Groups (like 'the people') appear to have a collective mind when they do things like vote, or buy one product rather than another. /2

But that's always because individuals in that group follow others in the group, in turn following some higher-status person who has chosen a direction. A decision is always led by some tiny number in the group (about 5%). That's true for politics, organisations, etc. /3

The idea of 'the people' is functionally equivalent to the idea of 'the market' in economics, the idea that optimum outcomes derive from allowing individuals to choose for themselves. But 95% of individuals will just follow what everybody else is doing. /4

We have words for it, things 'trend', they 'go viral'. We all went to school, we KNOW this is how collective human behaviour happens. There is no wisdom in numbers. (There may be wisdom in crowds if run in a highly specific way, as James Surowiecki showed.) /5

But that way is not a market, and it's not voting. Both of those are petrol poured on the fire of social emulation, imitation. They actively produce and amplify fads, fashions, 'viral' behaviour. /end

Even more gloriously (they laugh at us), Asia also now contains the dominant numbers of working-age adults. The people we’ve been importing as slave labour under the cover of ‘labour hire’ schemes. That flow will dry up as Asia continues its ascendancy. /2

While we in the West have desperately old populations, wallowing in old fantasies of empire, accumulating ‘the sights’ in perpetual tourism we can’t actually afford, still stuck in our old imperial ways of accumulation. That’s all our travel obsession is. /3

Instead of now travelling the world to accumulate sugar and spices and slaves, we now accumulate sights. We don’t even recognise where this urge we have to be continuously travelling comes from. Our societies are now in decay, aged care homes with no staff. /4

Paul Keating tried to alert us to this, to make us embrace Asia. He was followed by 3 decades of conservatives who sold fantasies of the old British empire, saluting flags and running continuous culture wars that are only desperate imaginings of glories long gone. /5

Now as Asia provides everything we use and even our workers, building the new world without us (and laughing at us), all we’re left with is get-rich-quick schemes like capital gains on housing and cryptocurrency. The old colonial settler culture. A quick buck. /6

Building nothing, sterile (birth rates in terminal free fall), celebrating ‘child-free’ cruises in glorious ignorance of the sterility of our entire culture that can’t even reproduce itself, let alone take over the world. /end

The pollution in the Cuyahoga caught fire in 1969. There are no known photos of that fire, but it prompted a national debate about pollution. What's interesting though is that the river had caught fire multiple times previously, prompting no action. Here, in 1948. 2/5 https://t.co/ygzcJgOpg4

Then again in 1952. Still nothing was done, for nearly another 20 years. 3/5 https://t.co/Gva4Xj3qIX

Political cartoon from 1964. Lots of awareness, no action though. Fighting for obvious things like the need for clean water and clean air can take decades. Societies are social, they won't budge without huge catastrophe, or unless somebody makes change go viral. 4/5 https://t.co/dQ503cT6lH

Pictures in Tweets 2-5 from: https://t.co/gWNuEbvLNR Origin of pic in Tweet 1 unknown, shared on FB.

Making individual cars much safer in collisions is like targeting immunity in individuals, against infectious disease. It will save lives. People can end up maimed and traumatised, but they’ll be alive, and many will have only minor injuries. /2 https://t.co/YWskBoQcjh

At the same time population measures are taken, to make it less likely these (safer) cars will ever collide. Roads are re-engineered. Similar to air and water being cleaned, to prevent infectious disease. Population-level measures. /3 https://t.co/JbcrdyGNdf

I’ve previously Tweeted about how separating individual and population measures is in fact a misunderstanding of these as two distinct things. Immunity for example is mostly useful to the extent it stops population spread of a disease. /4

Without that, the pathogen can continue to evolve, undermining the same immunity. Similarly, making cars safer also makes it less likely people will have accidents in them, harming others. What is best for populations is also best for individuals, there’s no binary. /5

Which brings me to the bit about us stopping where we ought to start. Because whether you look at road safety or infection, real progress in human affairs is rarely refining a framework you’re already living inside. The framing tends to be invisible. /6

In both of these cases, the elephant in the room is mobility. And in our case as a culture, hypermobility. All of our actions on road safety and infectious disease tend to assume that our hypermobility is a given. It’s that hypermobility that generates and accelerates risk. /7

Not just movement itself, our obsessive travelling. More important is the dislocation it’s merely a symptom of. The refusal to occupy space in a meaningful way. The forgetting of PLACE, transformed into spaces we just move through, at increasing speed and regularity. /8

Both of these areas of risk become much less so if we just stay home. Much more often. If we rediscover what home actually means. It’s not an address, a locator in movement culture. It’s much deeper than that. It’s understanding what it means to be grounded. /9

To understand why place is sacred to most cultures, except ours. That’s why we obsessively travel to other cultures, to consume the magic of place they create, which we’re now incapable of creating in our own countries. We destroy places in our travel. ‘Seeing the sights’. /10

We choose to live with a pandemic because we refuse to restrict hypermobility. And this isn’t just OS travel, it’s basics like refusing to align work and home inside our own culture. The hypermobility of commuting, for example. /11 https://t.co/xOQ76dVqQw

We’re an old, imperial culture. Movement, dislocation and accumulation is what defines most empires. That framing is lost on us, we simply don’t understand that it’s our old imperial need to be constantly moving and accumulating that in turn drives our modern hypermobility. /12

The idea of staying put, of being grounded, is alien to us. It doesn’t compute. And so we spread disease with abandon. Pathogens occupy space too, in ecosystems like us. By disrupting ecosystems with our hypermobility, we set them loose. /13

They become decoupled from the complex place-based controls that usually keep them in check with other organisms. Until Western culture realises that it has no idea of what place even is any more, none of this will improve. /end

Can we ship our libertarians off to an island somewhere, where they can live in glorious Lord of the Flies freedom? It would rocket the liberated countries up the rankings. 2/2

I do a lot of work with road engineers. Roads are either not fixed, or only patched by quick pothole backfills, because there’s no money to do anything else. It’s a matter of extreme frustration for them, because they know how to make roads that don’t have these problems. /2

Interestingly where I live highway repairs in recent years have taken a very different approach. Whole sections of damaged road have been ripped out, and replaced with top-quality resurfacing, using really thick layers of hot mix, normally reserved only for critical roads. /3

It’s MUCH more expensive. But this is where it gets interesting. Because it’s only much more expensive NOW, in the present. The calculation has finally been done that it actually *saves* money, over the longer term, a 35-40 year timeframe. /4

Cheaper to do this than send road crews out continuously over that 35-40 year period to patch damage. We can extend this to anything really, including Covid. We’re patching holes there, mopping up the continuous damage. Baulking at the cost of proper disease elimination. /5

But that’s a false economy. Slowing disease and death in the present will not prevent that ongoing infection and disease costing you more, in lives and dollars, over the longer term. It’s always the area under the curve, not the peaks and troughs of the present. /6

But economic politics married to populist politics doesn’t do long-term. It has an attention span of about 10 minutes. All that matters is winning elections and protecting the economic status quo. To finish by coming back to Rod. /7

Because another insight into our culture is the populist response to it. Nobody asks why rich rock stars have the money to do things like fix rods and buy MRI machines (another Rod project), while local authorities don’t. Much easier to take cheap shots at the authority. /8 https://t.co/U4w3BanecR

Populism starves public institutions of the resources they need to do their job, and then performs symbolic acts of outrage in the ruins. I doubt Rod understand that his shovelling gravel into potholes makes him legally liable if that inadequate repair causes an accident. /9 https://t.co/LcMRraOudE

That would be just the first of many things populism doesn’t understand. New Civil Engineer’s article on this is worth a read: https://t.co/CNFoOgHR19 /end

Is it because vaccinating the young eliminates most community spread of the diseases, meaning adults are at much lower risk? 2) For how many of the listed vaccines does protection against severe disease remain after the listed period of protection? 3) Related to 2)… 2/3

…is durability of immunity here immunity to severe disease, or infection? /end

I don’t think we see just how deeply infected we are by populism. It’s the culture of schools, which we never give up, even as adults. We LOVE the cut and thrust of shifts in popularity and status. This platform is full of it. Social media is an economy of likes. /2

It’s the infrastructure of popularity culture, used to now dominate the world. We already had a Twitter president. Popularity solves NOT ONE PROBLEM. If a building collapses, there’s zero connection between the people with expertise to diagnose and fix it, and popularity. /3

The two have absolutely no link at all. But we refuse to see it, for our biggest problems of all, the ones governments manage every day. We let governments be run on one metric only. Popularity, who can win elections. These days that’s who’s best with social media. /4

There’s no job interview, no assessment of expertise, experience or aptitude. And yes, nobody could possibly *have* the expertise to solve the thousands of activities governments manage. That’s the point. Thousands of government officials have that expertise. /5

But our popularity gods sack them, bypass them, call them ‘unelected’ and basically run a daily fantasy that they, the elected, are ’running the country’. Some of them were furniture salesmen or suburban accountants before being elected. /6

And now they’re supposedly running things like delicate geopolitical negotiations on conflict, climate change, trade etc. People believe this! There’s a wonderful scene in Yes Prime Minister where the PM jokes that he and the US President kept falling asleep in a meeting. /7

And he says to Sir Humphrey, his lead official, that it’s a bit of a worry, that they were both too tired to do anything. Humphrey smiles and says not at all, the officials had already done all of the work before the meeting even started. /8

That *is* how representative democracy was designed to work. The Chinese invented what we call the public or civil service. The Brits copied them when faced with social problems that were well beyond the in-bred toffs self-elected to parliament to solve. /9

Australia and other modern democracies adopted the same system, for the same reason. It’s unimaginably stupid to think elected politicians run anything at all. This isn’t to suggest we should just have a government of ‘technocrats’ either, a common counter. /10

It means government should be ruthlessly re-focused back on *solving practical problems*. Elected pollies’ actual role is to be a liaison point with the community, not to run anything. To ‘bring the community along’ with necessary changes. /11

Instead they’ve hijacked the whole ship (of State). Populism has allowed them to assume an authority the system was never designed for them to have. They re-route massive infrastructure projects (as just one example) to get more votes in marginal areas. /12

The whole practical work of running societies has been re-purposed to the continuous popularity and status games of the elected. We get more and more elections, early elections, and more and more leaders, like revolving doors. This is why, populism has won. /13

It has people seriously believing the elected run countries (or States, or towns). They never have, and never should. It’s like thinking school captains run schools. Or even worse, that the most popular jocks in the playground run them. /14

Many teachers might agree that is in fact what has happened, in schools. Whole societies threw their entire social development into reverse gear and have been driving at maximum speed, in reverse, back to a perpetual adolescence. Nothing but popularity status games. /15

Scroll through your Twitter feed and look at how deeply people love it. Not really interested in the practical details of the problems of the world, but utterly, obsessively fascinated with arguing about the people jostling for status around those problems. Who cares? /16

Who cares if ‘the Left’ or ‘the Right’ or ‘independents’ or the ‘neoliberals’ are in the ascendancy? None of them have a clue how anything actually, materially, works in the societies they live in. Let’s get rid of all popularity politics, and just list our practical…/17

…material problems. And find the people with the expertise to solve them. And then fix the problems. The popularity/status crowd can then stay on social media arguing all day to their heart’s content, with their ridiculous and irrelevant ideologies. /18

As Bruno Latour once called it, drawing on coding language, an ‘object-oriented democracy’. Or in other words, a democracy focused on fixing material problems. Fixing roads, rivers, energy systems, schools, hospitals, aged care etc. /19

When you have a leak, you want a good plumber. Not the most *popular* plumber, who could be hopeless. Just a good plumber. (And remember politicians don’t even know anything about plumbing.) Drop this ridiculous fantasy that daily arguing over which elected windbag to choose…/20

…is ‘democracy’ in action. It isn’t, it’s a total perversion of democracy. High school life dominating adult life. The endless jostling for an empty, useless status that doesn’t fix a single problem. Fixing and building things will bring us together as a society. /21

Not arguing over who’s the most popular person to fix and build things, a person who won’t have a clue how to anyway. Like the Romans, they survived so long, because they built things. That should be us again. /end

Suggesting only a small fraction again of that 0.7-5% need to be targeted. The superspreaders. Most easily by targeting the locations where their superspreading is likely to infect many others, such as schools. Ventilating schools properly might end the pandemic quickly. 2/2

Have a look at its car production, easily more than triple the next greatest producer, the US. And it’s far and away the greatest force behind the needed shift to EVs. It also builds much of our renewable energy technology. Like Japan and then Korea, it also learns fast. /2 https://t.co/pobF5iHw9e

Early Chinese vehicles, like early Japanese and Korean vehicles, suffered from quality problems. But all 3 nations were able to do something revolutionary, fast. Begin to produce vehicles of extraordinary quality, at only a fraction of the cost of European luxury brands. /3

Some will of course say this is due to their much lower wages and poorer working conditions, though I don’t think that’s true for Japan or even South Korea now. Our lazy, entitled old Western empires exported nearly our entire manufacturing bases, to China. /4

In the free market fanaticism of the 1980s, through to the early 2000s, and still today. The Chinese were smart and hard-working enough to turn that to their advantage. Most of their industrial output now doesn’t even come back to us. It goes to other parts of Asia. /5 https://t.co/bkBWsyZLew

This is how empires tend to end, with lazy complacency, populations drunk on recreational lifestyles that they think happen by themselves, with the actual work invisible. The Anglo world has belatedly realised this, and in Oz, the UK and US manufacturing is a priority again. /6

I suspect it’s too late. At the same time you’ll see lots of stories of not enough skilled workers or expertise. It takes decades to build this sort of industrial capacity. We had it and gave it away due to ridiculous zealots and their free market beliefs. /7

Countries who build things, survive. Not just ‘economically’, building things is the key to social stability. It’s the only thing that can bypass the otherwise eternal strife and disagreement that comes from conflicting human desires. Building things creates social discipline. /8

The West is now bogged down in its fatally flawed ideas about democracies being places where everybody gets up every day and just utters their opinions, on everything. Producing nothing, except hot air and conflict. Building things requires structure and routine. /9

A calm, measured focus on practical problem-solving. Exactly what we now need, rather than the daily meaningless babble of disagreement and clashing ideologies. You don’t need to be ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ to build a car. You need to be engineers and tradespeople. /10

Until we recognise that sensible, calm, problem-focused *building* of things is what used to be at the core of our successful societies, nothing will change. And it will become the Asian century. Or millennium. /end

We knew this earlier in the pandemic, it was the basis of much public health action, to target locations where superspreading would be more likely i.e. mostly crowds, in indoor spaces. Except in schools, which politically were forced open without mitigations. /2 https://t.co/KDxxSM7Hvw

The flip side of this is that we knew Covid was in fact much easier to eliminate from widespread community exposure than we at first feared. Australia’s ‘lockdowns’ for example hit Covid for six, even when they weren’t very long. But we didn’t use that insight. /3

We went straight from there, to uncontrolled spread. To ‘personal responsibility’ public health. What we could and I think should have done, and could still do today, is target Covid’s main breeding grounds. Schools. Easily the most ‘mixing’ of all public spaces. /4 https://t.co/xnZcsmijZC

The entire community mixes in schools, through its children. Workplaces much less so, which contain people from much more restricted geographical locations. (Remembering though that schools are also workplaces.) The recent UK prevalence data bears this out. /5

The highest prevalence of Covid is still in children. And that’s schools at work, where children mix. Until Covid pretty much everybody agreed schools were the major driver of spread of infectious respiratory disease. Only the politics of Covid made people doubt that. /6 https://t.co/snoRNCCErx

Even if you take Covid out of the equation, this infectious respiratory disease was costing societies like Australia billions of dollars every year, in sickness. Tens of billions if you include presenteeism (turning up to work sick). The thing to do here is glaringly obvious. /7

Ventilate schools. Drive down ALL respiratory disease in the community. The economic saving alone from even one year of doing this would pay for the retrofitting needed many times over. Those who oppose further Covid action are like politicians from the early 2000s. /8

The ones who, entirely for political purposes, tried to convince us that terrorism was a threat to our entire culture. It was always a highly localised, networked threat, not the population-wide hysteria that was deliberately cultivated for votes. /9 https://t.co/1wwWvw94LH

Similarly Covid minimisers try to terrify people (while simultaneously accusing those who want more action of hysteria) into thinking any further action will mean locking entire societies down, suppressing freedoms and making us all mentally ill. But let’s go back to k. /10

We don’t need to do any of that. We just need to slow spread in superspreading locations. Enough to get that Ro below 1. Exponential decline will do the rest. Ventilate the schools, which already had a record of decades of poor air quality. This is our children, ffs. /11

Nobody loses, ventilating schools. The fabled economy gets to dramatically reduce its presenteeism and absenteeism, slowing the spread of disease into the wider community from schools. Kids and teachers would be much healthier and miss a lot fewer days. /12

And their families and working parents the same, sick much less often and more productive. I mean, less sickness should be all the motivation we need. But let’s add productivity for the feeble-minded who think society is an economy. /13

Covid is a highly localised problem, portrayed as a universal problem to solve. That’s what creates the wider inertia to do anything at all. If only Kevin Rudd had made school ventilation the GFC stimulus, instead of school halls. Covid would have been over here now. /end

#auspol

It’s the reverse point to another I made a while back, that stopping yourself becoming infected is not just an individual act. By interrupting chains of transmission, you’re potentially preventing thousands of other infections. Your individual action *is* collective action. /2

The networked nature of infectious disease collapses our frameworks of thinking around local and global, individual and collective. The thread is saying, don’t portray the solution to Covid as fixing everything, everywhere. That’s unnecessary and why action doesn’t happen. /3

Because the solution seems too big, too disruptive, too expensive. But it doesn’t need to be, we just need to find the superspreading sites, that generate the networks in the first place. That’s schools. The hub of the infection networks, stretching into the entire community. /4

This same network dynamics is why we don’t even need ‘sterilising’ vaccines. We’re making the perfect the enemy of the good. We just need to reduce viral load enough, in peoples’ bodies and in collective air spaces, to slow transmission, below Ro = 1. /5

Once we do that, exponential decay does the rest. That’s how networked things work. What allows viruses to spread is also their greatest weakness. Once you find the breeding hubs, targeting them collapses the networks everywhere. /end

The US and UK were the dominant early hubs for Covid. Here in Oz and also now NZ, we were latecomers to this game of do nothing against a pandemic, but we caught up fast. A great Anglo 'fuck you' to the rest of the world. /2 https://t.co/DwfSYI0XKL

We had form. We've used the word 'endemic' to mean disease that won't go away, almost universally applied to poorer countries, where we happily left diseases to fester while eliminating their spread at home. Now in economy politics, we use it at home too. /3 https://t.co/bAOJmHtNWE

The same argument for reducing spread in schools - to target the hubs to collapse the networks of infection - should have applied internationally too. And often did, pre-Covid. But today's political libertarians in the UK and US weren't having it. /4 https://t.co/ovMvJIX1t1

And therefore we ended up with a pandemic, because the Anglo hubs kept pumping fresh infections around the globe, with their hypermobility. Planes were the new mosquitoes. As Oz and NZ showed early, none of that was inevitable. We hit Covid for six, in quick time. /5

Specious arguments were made about not being able to 'lock down forever'. We never needed to lock down forever. We did it as an emergency measure, until we knew more about Covid. One of the early things we learned about it was that it was weak. /6

That very few people transmitted it, and if you could identify the 'superspreading' locations, you could shut it down. Fast. Those turned out to be schools. Ludicrously, the very places we did the LEAST Covid work on. /7

The whole Covid narrative is infected by the hysterical claims of the political libertarians. That we need some total, all-of-society disruption to bring it under control. Even the best-intentioned fall for it, hoping to get the whole country masking, ventilating, vaccinating. /8

The job needed is quite small, precisely targeted, fast and relatively inexpensive. Shut down the hubs. Ventilate schools. Exponential maths will do the rest. /end

Proper HVAC systems can seem expensive. Estimates though say it’s about 1% of the cost of the avoided infections. I think that’s conservative, given that schools are the breeding ground for much respiratory infectious disease in society. /2 https://t.co/In5HNnjES8

The other way to see this is to ask, how many other major public, or even private buildings, with hundreds or even a thousand or more occupants, don’t already have HVAC systems? How much of our ‘normal’ pre-Covid life of up to 10 colds a year was the result of this gap? /3

There’s an interesting study to be done on the role of schools in the development of the pathogen ecosystems we inhabit now. Maybe somebody has already done it. How much ‘just like a cold/flu’ is really describing the absence of basic HVAC, in schools. /4

I’m old-fashioned, I prioritise the needs of my kids above my own most of the time. It seems an appalling indictment of our culture that schools are so often shitholes for kids, physically and mentally. That we don’t even care they breathe filthy air. /5

Reality has a way of inserting itself into that stupidity. As we’re discovering now with Covid, where schools provide a constant new stream of chains of infection out into the wider community. Time for some grown-up governance, methinks. /end

Fixing Covid is not a task of convincing and acting on billions of individuals. It’s a MUCH smaller problem of just targeting the hubs, where the infection begins. Schools. The car industry is an example of the same mechanism. Pretend cars are viruses. /2 https://t.co/yYXyxJLwVs

You see millions of cars out on the roads, and if you were interested in the ‘spread’ of cars, you might think you need to follow and control all of these millions of cars. But they all come from a handful of hubs. Car factories. Every single one of those cars is networked. /3 https://t.co/dv6NH5VLWy

Back to the factory where it was made, which also produces spare parts, upgrades etc. It’s the network that makes cars exist and functional, and it’s the hubs in the networks which drive (ha) the whole process. Proven just recently, by the pandemic. /4 https://t.co/eIs2lALONA

Where you couldn’t buy or even repair a car, without months or even years of delay. The hubs couldn’t access their raw materials. Starve the hubs, you destroy the networks. No need to deal with each of the individual cars, without their networks and source hubs, they collapse. /5 https://t.co/FR0UakhDvI

You can see this exact same network structure everywhere. Mobile phones is another, where we assume a sort of universal country-wide coverage, just as we assume society is this homogenous mass of millions of separate individuals. /6

But mobile phones don’t work outside very tightly-defined networks, formed by transmission hubs. ‘Cell towers’. Move outside of these even a bit, and you get nothing. Society is lumpy, lots of hubs with skinny fragile networks flowing out of them. /7 https://t.co/k12ZxTIo3X

Another classic and pertinent example is ‘range anxiety’ for electric vehicles. Drivers of ICE vehicles are used to having a service station where they need one, because that fuel supply network (which costs a fortune) was built out over many years. /8

The range of ICE vehicles is completely arbitrary, it’s the fuel supply network that actually defines it. For example in Australia there are about 20 million ICE vehicles. That might make you think there must be hundreds of thousands of refuelling stations. Not even close. /9

There are only about 7000. Those again are the hubs, that make the whole network operate. The cell towers of driving. So why does all of this matter? Most fundamentally for me, because it completely shifts how to understand ‘democracy’. /10

Democracy is absolutely not, despite what anybody says, some amorphous mass called ‘the people’. Groups of people, of whatever size, simply don’t act as a coordinated single entity in that way. They form networks, organised around hubs. Society is lumpy, like phones or cars. /11

They don’t look like the colour picture here. They look like the black and white picture. The hubs are their beliefs, organised in status hierarchies around key leaders or influencers. Those influencer hubs create networks, thin tendrils out into society. /12 https://t.co/RPY6QSzI5P

And these hubs and networks are constantly shifting, sometimes incredibly fast. The key thing here is only tiny numbers of people can create vast networks that give an impression of ‘the people’ all supporting something. But it’s always just a skinny network, linked to a hub. /13

This makes change much easier and faster than the idea of democracy and societies as millions of separate individuals does. As I’ve Tweeted for Covid, it makes us completely misunderstand how to fix problems, and to magnify the difficulty. /14

Covid is maintained in only a small handful of hubs - schools - that continue to irrigate the networks out into wider society, through contact with kids and staff. Target the hubs, and the whole network collapses. No need to mask millions of people or otherwise impact them. /15

Similarly the ‘elites’ many talk about are and always have been the TINIEST minority of people. They have never, not once in history, had strength in numbers. But they’ve been masters at creating networked hubs. Media networks for example, networked to millions of people. /16

They own the key tabloids and radio stations and now social media. The hubs. It allows them to seem like they have the support of ‘the people’. That support is only hub-deep, it’s incredibly fragile, thin networks. Regulate those hubs and that all collapses. /17

It’s why they hate regulation, they call it ‘red tape’. That regulation targets the handful of hubs which create the illusion they’re everywhere, and all-powerful. Society is lumpy. Understand that, and all the local/global stuff disappears. It’s all hubs and networks. /end

Many people here could list the main Covid minimisers easily, and quickly. They wouldn’t fill a school bus. Network diagrams show that what appears as millions of people actively supporting something is really the tiniest handful of people, acting as network hubs. /2 https://t.co/6w5nLRlmu8

You have to target the hubs. This has always been true. Elizabeth 1’s right-hand assassin and adviser Sir Francis Walsingham didn’t travel the countryside looking for anybody who may have expressed a negative view about the Queen. /3 https://t.co/Er0NG1tnB3

He ruthlessly identified, tortured and removed the handful of hubs, mobilising support against the Queen. The anti-climate and anti-Covid action people know all of this, it’s how they operate. Good people labour under the illusion these same actors generate. /4

The illusion that ‘the people’ is doing all of this. It’s a lie. As Walsingham says to the Duke of Norfolk before beheading him, ‘the people’ will not remember him, once his mobilising hub-work is terminated. And no, in 2024 we don’t need beheadings! /5 https://t.co/Er0NG1tnB3

We just need to stop mistaking the actions of a tiny, really really tiny, number of people for the actions of ‘the people’. And for Covid, we need to stop seeing it as acting always, everywhere. It’s not, it’s breeding in a very small number of hubs. /6

And forming tiny, skinny networks from there out into the community, to try to form new hubs elsewhere. If you take away Covid’s hub-making, it’s dead. We knew this back when we did contact tracing. We didn’t extend that insight into the next phase. /7

We just need to identify and target hubs. I’ll still bet the critical hubs for Covid are schools. It’s them for other diseases, like influenza. Not coincidentally, the least ventilated or sanitised parts of our whole public infrastructure. /end

Churches were often the first thing new communities built. They became the centre of their community, a hub that gathered them all together once a week, and networked to all other churches and to HQ by the network of priests. /2 https://t.co/DYroRzCalH

In this way, the Church more broadly was able to cover entire continents, with very few resources. It’s always the same basic model, some sort of hub where you can gather people to create that sense of connection, of a ‘community’. But linked to all other communities. /3

Via a very tiny, fragile network of priests who maintained the flow of information and directions across the network, allowing a coordination of the entire society from a small central hub. You can physically see the network structure. /4

Nearly all of the geographical area that made up these communities had no physical presence of the church at all. Just this small, often magnificent, building, where they would all gather once a week to create a feeling of community. /5

Now many or even most of these churches lay empty. Often sold to people who renovate them as boutique homes. Does that mean our societies are now less networked? Not on your nelly. /6 https://t.co/D1HPYwlt4o

Suburbia can at first glance give you a feeling like ‘the people’ is actually a thing, millions existing side-by-side. (You don’t get that feeling in the remote areas with churches, just vast open spaces with sheep and kangaroos. Only the church-hub feels like ‘the people’.) /7 https://t.co/7XHQ4wGLWs

All of the people living in these rows of houses are living that same hub-and-network existence. But now the hubs are often invisible, geographically. We use communication technologies now to coordinate our social lives, to create and maintain hubs. And we use work. /8

The people who live in these homes are part of workplaces that act as hubs, they’re a Bunnings person, or a Qantas person, or a teacher in the Department of Education etc. The proximity of their homes hides that what coordinates their lives is often hubs separated by miles. /9

Thousands of miles, sometimes they work for a hub located on the other side of the world. But they live less than 2m from the person next door, who works for another hub 25 km away. And then let’s add their online hubs, the greatest shift of all. /10

The social media networks and hubs they subscribe to. What on the outside looks like a community, defined by homes, is in reality a bewildering array of networks that can mean a suburb like this shares almost nothing in common. No great community projects may happen here. /11 https://t.co/80PH5SS01u

Because the people who live here are part of communities (plural) that can stretch across the entire planet. Where they *physically* live is almost irrelevant. We can all feel this, how we share a street with people we barely know. Many closer to people thousands of km away. /12

This also isn’t a plea to all get out and know our neighbours either, as if geography is the only meaningful structuring principle for community. The old regional communities never did that, their community came from God and his priests, not from living next door. /13

It’s also a mistake to think this means there are millions of hubs and communities. Networks are lumpy. You get a few large hubs, not millions of tiny ones. Because humans are social, and 95% of people will follow what 5% of ‘influencers’ do. /14 https://t.co/1maHP06DAX

Take any large crowd like this, and as with the suburban homes, it’s tempting to think this is ‘the people’ in some way. But if you could see the networks and hubs each of the people who are in this crowd participate in, it wouldn’t be the homogenous mass you see here. /15 https://t.co/gd9A1zvqtD

It’d be more like this. Affiliations with different hubs, of varying sizes, with potentially no connections to the people physically standing next to them at all. All of society is like this. It’s not ‘the people’, that’s a phrase tyrants use to justify their actions. /16 https://t.co/beOMta9Apc

It’s lumpy. A relatively few hubs, that people affiliate with, with no necessary connection to their geographical location. I watch UK news for example, but not much Australian news (where I live). This is why the idea of local and global have always been bizarre, and wrong. /17

As if we have a local life, and a global life happens above and beyond that, somewhere. Our networked lives are independent of those geographical markers. Our libertarian politicians network with their mates in the UK and US, daily. That’s their ‘local’ lives. /18

If we want to change societies, we have to understand them. They’re not ‘the people’, as some amorphous mass of millions with some collective group mind. They’re fragile networks, attached to hubs. The hubs are what give an impression of collectivity. /19

Just as Covid (and its champions) seem to be everywhere in our societies, when in fact both exist in a relative handful of hubs, and then network out into the wider community to try to establish more hubs. Just as churches did. /20

Hubs and networks create the illusion of wide coverage, when in reality nothing exists outside these incredibly thin and fragile networks. People, in the sense of all of us, don’t organise or aggregate, outside these hub-networks. There is no way that could practically work. /21

Just as Covid doesn’t just spread at will through the entire community, though minimisers paradoxically want us to think that, to engender a feeling of helplessness, nothing can be done, we’ll have to live with it. Covid lives in fragile networks and hubs. /22

Find them, shut them down, and Covid is over, except for the occasional sporadic outbreak. Like all other infectious diseases we control. And like I say a lot, I will still wager those hubs are schools. Those cathedrals of filthy air. /end

I agree with Cameron that we could instead redirect this level of saving to making the aged pension even more generous, drop the eligibility age to 60 again (or even to 55) and invest in things like public housing. 2/2

And so we had several glorious decades of prosperity and peace, sometimes bizarrely called ‘the golden age of capitalism’. Bizarre because what brought that prosperity and peace was the heaviest government intervention in ordinary life in history. It created ‘the public’. 2/7

Mentioning it here because Cameron Murray’s book on housing refers to this same period, and draws the same conclusions, for housing. To quote: “…the ‘golden age’ of economic expansion—the end of World War II until the mid-1970s.” 3/7

“That age not only saw a great demographic change due to the baby boom, but it ended with a peak in many social indicators. That age, for example, saw the highest rate of public housing construction in Australia and the United Kingdom…Considered over a longer time frame,…4/7

…the housing market of the last four decades looks like a return to the normal operation of private property markets after an abnormal break in the mid-twentieth century…Historically, housing markets were always divided between the haves and have-nots. What we are seeing… 5/7

…since the 1980s is a return to the normal operation of housing markets after the post-Word War II decades of heavy government intervention.” This is also what we’re experiencing for Covid, a return to public health (or rather absence of) approaches from earlier centuries. 6/7

Because the politics from the late-1970s to today has been most fundamentally an all-out assault on public everything. Old (and new) elites attacking the State, to restore old hierarchies. That’s what ‘the economy’ and its markets are. Not economic, they’re political. /end

It’s been public institutions, tasked with the job of managing things like this. Like the CSIRO, as just one example, this is an early photo of some of their staff at work. Governments set up institutions in response to desperate problems they don’t know how to fix. /2 https://t.co/ZpPz3QAOKV

In the case of the CSIRO, as just one example, by the turn of the 20th century, Australian agriculture, easily our dominant economic activity then, was being crippled by a whole range of problems like pests, diseases and drought, that it had no idea how to solve. /3

Prime Minister Billy Hughes pushed to establish what is now the CSIRO, saying: “Science can make rural industries commercially profitable, making the desert bloom like a rose; it can make rural life pleasant as well as profitable … /4 https://t.co/lABaTiOYEh

“Science will lead the manufacturer into green pastures by solving for him problems that seemed to him insoluble. It will open up a thousand new avenues for capital and labour.” Once these specialist institutions are set up, they manage these problems using expertise. /5 https://t.co/J5ZScikBuQ

What’s more important though is that this management is not only outside electoral cycles, it’s inter-generational. It continues over multiple lifetimes. It just happens, in the background, invisible to most people. Public health is exactly the same. /6

It’s been happening our whole lives. Most of the public doesn’t even know it exists, let alone having ever seen it at work, apart from the odd vaccination. The desperate pleas to take grown-up charge of our current problems are completely wasted on politicians. /7

Particularly on modern populist politicians. They love to suggest to people that they ‘run the country’. Politicians have never run countries, except symbolically. They just get in the way, it’s not their job. Billy Hughes had the humility to know this. /8

Our current politicians not only lack that humility, they’re aggressively the opposite. Decades of ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’ narratives have done their damage. You won’t find anything that ordinary people have more contempt for than their local council, for example. /9

Local government’s origins are actually heavily about epidemics and pandemics. Put there to control essential disease-control mechanisms like garbage removal, water supply and sewage. All because of past experience with infectious disease. /10

We can’t beat Covid or climate change by voting. It’s an illusion. And we can’t easily just put institutions back either. Which leaves very few options, except to use network politics to counter the network politics of the institution-smashers. /end

Orwellian language. Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to fund the nation’s future! And sovereign wealth funds have LOTS going for them, public investment for public ends. But what was The Future Fund set up to fund? /2

Completely unfunded, gold-plated superannuation liabilities for politicians and public servants. Super schemes of outrageous extravagance, that were put in place and then never funded. And some dislike targeting generations for this, but I’m afraid this was pure boomer. /3

Only they qualified for these schemes. Access to them was ruthlessly restricted, nobody else was allowed. I know, I’m Gen X, and the door was slammed shut to these schemes when I reached working age. I watched boomer colleagues head out the door to retirement at 55. /4

On some of these super plans, they retired early (55) at their final working salary, often in the hundreds of thousands, for the rest of their life. Many had contributed barely a cent to the schemes in their entire working lives. And what’s the Future Fund currently worth? /5

Over $272 billion. Let that sink in, in a ‘cost of living crisis’. The FF now also oversees 6-7 other, much smaller sovereign wealth funds. Targeted at things like medical research, disasters, and more recently Albo’s Housing Australia Future Find, with a measly $10 billion. /6

Which is supposed to help fund public and affordable housing. A pittance. The FF is more than all of these other sovereign funds, combined, several times over. And remember its main purpose - fixing extravagant gold-plated unfunded super for a generation currently retiring. /7

The problem isn’t that the old are screwing the young. That’s absolutely happening. It’s *why* they’re doing it. Because they’ve never accepted ageing. Never accepted withdrawing from the centrality of society as they aged, to make way for new generations. /8

They chewed up and spat out any idea of a circle of life, with each generation playing a specific role. Replacing it with an eternal adolescent youth of lifestyle fun and entertainment. ‘You can’t take it with you!’ they proudly beam. This is the Woodstock generation. /9

Which many forget was proudly anti-establishment, at its core. And we wonder where political libertarianism came from today, that wrecking ball of the established order. Not from the ‘Right’. It was a cultural shift. A refusal to age. Sure many also plan to pass on wealth. /10

Philanthropy isn’t public policy. We’re now the US. And sure ‘not all boomers’ are wealthy. But I remember ‘not all men’ not being an excuse for the patriarchy either. This shift was clearly generational, and not accidental. Accountability means at least admitting it. /end