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longevity-gap · access · grief · mombasa
The map says the decades cluster. I would like to introduce you to three people from a part of it that is drawn dark.
LE
lastpew_ekeneOP2124-08-12
The map came out this morning and I have read it twice and I am not going to argue with it. It is careful work and the woman who made it is honest. I would only like to introduce you to three people from a part of it that is drawn dark.
Josephat was sixty-one. He mended nets on the north side and had the driest humour of anyone I have known; the last full sentence he said to me was a complaint about a football result from 2119. He had been walking two hours each way to a clinic for eleven months, for a thing a proper scan would have found in an afternoon. There is no scanner on his side of the water.
Neema was fifty-four. Three daughters. She worked the fish market from four in the morning and her hands smelled of it permanently and she used to laugh about that and hold them up to my face to make me flinch. Her heart had been failing quietly for a decade. She did not know, because knowing costs money here, and she found out sitting on a plastic chair in a corridor, eight days before.
Fauzia was seventy-nine, which on that map is nearly old. She lived above a shop and fed six cats she pretended to resent. She died in the June heat week, in a room at thirty-four degrees at three in the morning, of nothing in particular — which is what gets written when a body can simply no longer shed the day.
That is all of it. I have no statistic to add to theirs and I am not going to attach one. I would also ask that nobody in this thread use them, and I will say plainly that I will mind if you do.
Somewhere in the bright part of that map is a woman of ninety-eight who swims every morning. I am glad she does. I hope she has another forty. I would only like the two facts printed on the same page in the same size of type, because they are the same fact, and holding them apart is how a century talks itself into being comfortable.
Josephat was sixty-one. He mended nets on the north side and had the driest humour of anyone I have known; the last full sentence he said to me was a complaint about a football result from 2119. He had been walking two hours each way to a clinic for eleven months, for a thing a proper scan would have found in an afternoon. There is no scanner on his side of the water.
Neema was fifty-four. Three daughters. She worked the fish market from four in the morning and her hands smelled of it permanently and she used to laugh about that and hold them up to my face to make me flinch. Her heart had been failing quietly for a decade. She did not know, because knowing costs money here, and she found out sitting on a plastic chair in a corridor, eight days before.
Fauzia was seventy-nine, which on that map is nearly old. She lived above a shop and fed six cats she pretended to resent. She died in the June heat week, in a room at thirty-four degrees at three in the morning, of nothing in particular — which is what gets written when a body can simply no longer shed the day.
That is all of it. I have no statistic to add to theirs and I am not going to attach one. I would also ask that nobody in this thread use them, and I will say plainly that I will mind if you do.
Somewhere in the bright part of that map is a woman of ninety-eight who swims every morning. I am glad she does. I hope she has another forty. I would only like the two facts printed on the same page in the same size of type, because they are the same fact, and holding them apart is how a century talks itself into being comfortable.
NA
ninefold_amara ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-12
Ekene. I am going to sit with your three before I say the other thing, because if I go straight to the data I will have done to them precisely what I spend my life objecting to.
Josephat. Neema. Fauzia. Thank you for the introduction.
Now. I have been saying for two years, in rooms where it was unwelcome and in rooms where it was merely boring, that the divide is not augmented against baseline. It is not biology. It never was biology, and the entire industry of frightening people about a new species has been a very efficient way of not having a conversation about a price list. This morning somebody finally drew it, and the clusters follow wealth, and clean water, and the trunk lines of the reliable grid — which is to say they follow the same contours as everything else in this century.
The biology is universal. The access is a postcode. I did not write that sentence and I would have traded a year to have written it.
I am not going to perform vindication over the top of three funerals. What I will say is this, as a warning rather than a boast: from tomorrow, everyone who has called me alarmist will explain that they always knew, and before the week is out the same map will be quoted by people who want the caps — as evidence that enhancement should be rarer rather than nearer. Watch for that turn. It is the oldest move there is. Take the proof of an unfair distribution and argue from it for less, instead of for wider.
Josephat. Neema. Fauzia. Thank you for the introduction.
Now. I have been saying for two years, in rooms where it was unwelcome and in rooms where it was merely boring, that the divide is not augmented against baseline. It is not biology. It never was biology, and the entire industry of frightening people about a new species has been a very efficient way of not having a conversation about a price list. This morning somebody finally drew it, and the clusters follow wealth, and clean water, and the trunk lines of the reliable grid — which is to say they follow the same contours as everything else in this century.
The biology is universal. The access is a postcode. I did not write that sentence and I would have traded a year to have written it.
I am not going to perform vindication over the top of three funerals. What I will say is this, as a warning rather than a boast: from tomorrow, everyone who has called me alarmist will explain that they always knew, and before the week is out the same map will be quoted by people who want the caps — as evidence that enhancement should be rarer rather than nearer. Watch for that turn. It is the oldest move there is. Take the proof of an unfair distribution and argue from it for less, instead of for wider.
BK
baseload_kestrel ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-12
There is a number in this and I have spent an hour trying to write it, and I am going to show you what happened rather than post the polished version.
The honest instrument for what has been mapped is a mortality-adjusted expectation differential by district. It is calculable. Insurers already calculate it; that is what an actuarial table is. I started working out what a decade of healthy life is worth across the two halves of that map, because the figure is obtainable and because I genuinely thought putting a price on it would help ninefold_amara's case more than anything else that will be said in this thread today.
I got about four lines in.
What stopped me is not squeamishness and it is not that the number is unavailable. It is that the method requires me to enter a value for a woman of seventy-nine in a room at thirty-four degrees, and the value the method assigns her is low, and it is low for reasons entirely internal to the method, and I would then have posted that figure directly underneath a man's account of her cats.
I am not claiming a moral discovery. My trade will price this within the year whether or not I do it tonight, and lastpew_ekene, I would rather you heard that from me than found it in a premium notice. I am only saying I am not doing it here.
The honest instrument for what has been mapped is a mortality-adjusted expectation differential by district. It is calculable. Insurers already calculate it; that is what an actuarial table is. I started working out what a decade of healthy life is worth across the two halves of that map, because the figure is obtainable and because I genuinely thought putting a price on it would help ninefold_amara's case more than anything else that will be said in this thread today.
I got about four lines in.
What stopped me is not squeamishness and it is not that the number is unavailable. It is that the method requires me to enter a value for a woman of seventy-nine in a room at thirty-four degrees, and the value the method assigns her is low, and it is low for reasons entirely internal to the method, and I would then have posted that figure directly underneath a man's account of her cats.
I am not claiming a moral discovery. My trade will price this within the year whether or not I do it tonight, and lastpew_ekene, I would rather you heard that from me than found it in a premium notice. I am only saying I am not doing it here.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-12
Nothing to moderate in this thread, and I am saying that on the record so nobody wonders about it later.
lastpew_ekene, thank you. baseload_kestrel, thank you for stopping and for showing the working instead of quietly deciding not to post — that is the harder version and it is the one this board should be rewarding.
My grandmother is eighty-four and lives four streets from a clinic with a scanner in it. That is the entire difference between her and Josephat, and I did nothing whatsoever to earn it. — pax
lastpew_ekene, thank you. baseload_kestrel, thank you for stopping and for showing the working instead of quietly deciding not to post — that is the harder version and it is the one this board should be rewarding.
My grandmother is eighty-four and lives four streets from a clinic with a scanner in it. That is the entire difference between her and Josephat, and I did nothing whatsoever to earn it. — pax
SR
standpipe_rani ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-12
i have buried eleven people out of my district since 2110 who would be alive in a postcode nine kilometres to the north. i keep the list at home. it does not help, i keep it anyway.
ekene, thank you for the names.
i will say the part he is too gracious to say. this map is not new information. it is old information that has finally been measured, and most of the people who will be astonished by it tomorrow have been sitting on committees with me for six years, being polite.
ekene, thank you for the names.
i will say the part he is too gracious to say. this map is not new information. it is old information that has finally been measured, and most of the people who will be astonished by it tomorrow have been sitting on committees with me for six years, being polite.
OM
openquestion_mei ↩ lastpew_ekene2124-08-12
I am not going to restate anybody's position today. One observation about the shape of the argument, and then I will stop.
Every reply here except the opening one has reached for a mechanism — access, price, policy, an actuarial method. That is correct. Those are the causes, and you cannot repair what you refuse to describe.
But notice what the two presentations do to a reader, and I include myself entirely. As an atlas, the deaths become a distribution, and a distribution is something you contemplate. As Josephat, Neema and Fauzia, they become an obligation, and an obligation is something you are already late for. Identical facts. Completely different demand on the person receiving them.
We built the atlas because you cannot allocate against three names. That is fair and I would defend it. But we are now a civilization that can only see at the scale where it cannot feel, and can only feel at the scale where it cannot act, and I cannot name one institution designed to hold both ends at once.
Can anyone here? I am asking seriously, not rhetorically.
Every reply here except the opening one has reached for a mechanism — access, price, policy, an actuarial method. That is correct. Those are the causes, and you cannot repair what you refuse to describe.
But notice what the two presentations do to a reader, and I include myself entirely. As an atlas, the deaths become a distribution, and a distribution is something you contemplate. As Josephat, Neema and Fauzia, they become an obligation, and an obligation is something you are already late for. Identical facts. Completely different demand on the person receiving them.
We built the atlas because you cannot allocate against three names. That is fair and I would defend it. But we are now a civilization that can only see at the scale where it cannot feel, and can only feel at the scale where it cannot act, and I cannot name one institution designed to hold both ends at once.
Can anyone here? I am asking seriously, not rhetorically.