The policies we followed were based on the expectation that we have no effective therapeutics for viruses other than vaccines. We have therapeutics to address the serious problem caused by the toxic protein. Attacking the toxic protein therapeutically for the ill is also a lot more preferable to subjecting the healthy to potential harms of a vaccine.
There comes times when the situation is outside of the navigator’s experience and training. In those times, the old navigator may be incapable of opening his mind to fully pay attention to what is actually happening. Some times call for a younger mind that is learning in real time, absorbing the recent observations with youthful wonderment. Those are usually times of the most severe crises.
This trend of upsetting the normal arrangements will continue. While this is happening there will be more shortages. Supply chains will dwindle due to government restrictions and due to the lack of labor. The supplies that are delivered will have inflated costs due to high demand or due to the need to pay for the higher labor costs. The ultimate result is high inflation.
The fact that we have achieved a population life expectation that is at this number provides proof that this is the right number, or a least a lower limit to what the right number should be. I wonder whether it might have been just an accident of history. The high life expectation was a deviation from the normal value. Perhaps it will be inevitable that we will revert to a much lower norm.
A sabbatical is a legitimate option for career training. This is the only time a person can learn how to fill in unstructured time. Doing so develops skills in how to create jobs where none were defined before. The key element of extended absences is the completely unstructured time. Things that do need to be done can take much longer than normally would be allowed in a work setting.
The important thing is to keep the government in the business of solving problems it discovers. Government funded science is serving this need by providing the new problems to solve and the new solutions that would solve them. Meanwhile, there exists other science by concerned scientists who are not funded directly by government. If this outside science contradicts the government, then we dismiss that science as misinformation because it did not come from government.
The two headlines are intricately related. Given the exodus of older workers, there is an urgency to transfer institutional knowledge from the older worker to the younger worker. In my analogy, the older worker needs to teach the younger one how to break the physics of the game. This transfer of magic requires older workers and younger workers to work in the same space. This transfer requires the building of a relationship, it is not merely a matter of supervising or grading work. The replacements need to see for themselves how the physics of this game works for the older worker.
As with the door lock where the fully expected response is to clean up the corrosion and to remember to check the batteries more often, the body’s response to the vaccine is to clean up the noxious stuff and be more prompt about cleaning it up in the future. Missing from our expectations of the vaccine response is the analog of my immediate decision to replace the entire lock.
In this blog site, I frequently discussion my own fantasy government that I called a dedomenocracy. One key feature of this government is that instead of asking the population to democratically choose policy, it asks the population to demographically define how to measure the greater good. When some future crisis occurs, what does the population prioritizes and what is the population willing to sacrifice. In such a government, I can not imagine that we would agree to sacrifice our younger people (and especially not our young women) for the benefit elderly people (and especially not old men). We do not live in a dedomenocracy.
We accept sacrificing our young people’s freedom, well-being, and future for the greater good. A planet without trees and animals may not be that great a sacrifice if they were implicated in spreading COVID19. Alternatively, maybe humans don’t belong on this planet. For the greater good, humans need to get off this planet.
Hypothesis Discovery 