Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: First: We humans are an anthology intelligence both with respect to knowledge and information and with respect to work and production. Put the one side are we manage ourselves in the realm of thought. How do we manage ourselves in the realm of work and production? Or, rather, how does each of us try to tune our by-now extremely sophisticated and fine division of labor so that we can accomplish our own purposes? Well, basically, there are three ways that we can appropriate for ourselves things out of the common pool created by Eric extremely sophisticated division of labor in production and work. We can do so by force, by fraud, or by win-win exchange. Which of those we choose is determined by how much we regard ourselves as invested in the well-being of others, how much effort each of these modes of action is for us, and how valuable is the work of those whose efforts we are trying to control and appropriate. When something becomes more valuable it is worth more of our energy to appropriate—and this can either be good or bad for those who make all the valuable things, depending...
Worth noting that there's a long-standing theory (I forget whose it is) regarding the decline of warfare in the 20th century. The theory is that war has become unprofitable. In the Roman era, armies came back with gold, jewels, materials, control of mines, slaves, control of land.
The theory is that the profitability of war has ended due to changes in relative value. It being much, much harder to coerce intellectual labor than it is to coerce physical labor; and harder to coerce skilled physical labor than brute physical labor; harder to coerce physical labor than to seize physical items; and harder to seize delicate scientific tools than to seize raw materials. I would extend it to say that it is harder for misogynists to control women for the purposes of "spreading their seed" now that birth control is almost impossible to suppress and abortion pills are available. When the most valuable thing in the country is the expertise of a scientist, it's impossible to seize it in war; the scientist can, and will, fail to cooperate.
So when the things which are considered valuable become harder to *loot*, war becomes less profitable. And when it becomes less profitable it declines.
So now we have wars driven by ideologues, who are doing it for principles (not profit); by the purely power-hungry, who want power (not profits); and by the fools who think they will profit (but won't). Those always happened. But we no longer have the like-clockwork wars of the Roman era, or of the Viking raids, or even of the Seneca raids, where going off to conquer someone was a profitable career.
Re Yglesias: Quite surprising. And a little hard to believe. I would tend to assume (or do I mean "hope"?) that the CDC's use of data internally is a little more sophisticated.
Worth noting that there's a long-standing theory (I forget whose it is) regarding the decline of warfare in the 20th century. The theory is that war has become unprofitable. In the Roman era, armies came back with gold, jewels, materials, control of mines, slaves, control of land.
The theory is that the profitability of war has ended due to changes in relative value. It being much, much harder to coerce intellectual labor than it is to coerce physical labor; and harder to coerce skilled physical labor than brute physical labor; harder to coerce physical labor than to seize physical items; and harder to seize delicate scientific tools than to seize raw materials. I would extend it to say that it is harder for misogynists to control women for the purposes of "spreading their seed" now that birth control is almost impossible to suppress and abortion pills are available. When the most valuable thing in the country is the expertise of a scientist, it's impossible to seize it in war; the scientist can, and will, fail to cooperate.
So when the things which are considered valuable become harder to *loot*, war becomes less profitable. And when it becomes less profitable it declines.
Except it was supposed to have become unprofitable a century ago...
So now we have wars driven by ideologues, who are doing it for principles (not profit); by the purely power-hungry, who want power (not profits); and by the fools who think they will profit (but won't). Those always happened. But we no longer have the like-clockwork wars of the Roman era, or of the Viking raids, or even of the Seneca raids, where going off to conquer someone was a profitable career.
Re Yglesias: Quite surprising. And a little hard to believe. I would tend to assume (or do I mean "hope"?) that the CDC's use of data internally is a little more sophisticated.
Maybe, the CDC are not being given access to the sort of ID'd data that they, and anyone, would need in order to make accurate summaries. I invite folks to look at Oregon's Covid webpage: https://govstatus.egov.com/OR-OHA-COVID-19 and see if they like the fairly detailed breakdown of things. I can't tell you if they are better at counting vaccinations than is the CDC, but I can tell you that my zip code really does have more vaccinated people than the others in my county, as the webpage says: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/oregon.health.authority.covid.19/viz/OregonCOVID-19VaccinationTrends/OregonStatewideVaccinationTrends
I really do not think that it is...
Well, it is my day job—or related to the day job, at least, most of it...