8 ms·

How is our social system so fragile? I mean seriously - thousands of years and wireless comms and rockets to the moon and not only do we forget to prepare for

• lonelappde 7y ago
  Rare catastrophes are hard to prepare for, because the cost of preparation is expensive. "Routinely happening" once a century or two isn't an easy target.
  • minikites 7y ago
    It's a perfectly achievable target, we just have one political party that prioritizes private corporate profits and the interests of very wealthy citizens above all other societal needs.
    • spritecranberry 7y ago
      Really, your solution to this is "Republicans bad"? The Democrats are far from perfect. I'm not happier than the next guy about the bail-outs of companies, but you're saying it's okay to dispense colossal hand-outs to everyone? The government cannot solve this problem. It's not the government's job. Bad things happen; go back to life.
    • yotossing 7y ago
      > one political party 2
    • lol2143651 7y ago
      Cringe
• abyssin 7y ago
  Don't even start to think about climate change, a phenomenon we're completely aware is happening, but still do nothing about, despite consequences that will be worse than this virus.
  • minikites 7y ago
    There a lot of well paid individuals who have the job of convincing regular people that climate change is a hoax and lots of regular people believe them.
    • threatofrain 7y ago
      Are these regular people citizens of a democracy? Then the chain of responsibility stops there. No greater entity will swoop in to help if the citizens of a democracy can’t be trusted to make the kinds of decisions confronting them. It’s only a democracy if you can keep it.
      • minikites 7y ago
        It's much more complicated than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book) > Bernays' thesis is that "invisible" people who create knowledge and propaganda rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen response. "Engineering consent" of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy. > Bernays explains: > "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."
      • __s 7y ago
        Global warming being a serious issue has widespread support. Unfortunately a democracy which is asked "Trump or Biden?" isn't really asking the population an important question
• minikites 7y ago
  "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
  • big_chungus 7y ago
    How is shrinking the government to blame? It's expanded colossal ever since the new deal. Grover Norquist, the guy you're quoting, is not an elected official. He was just saying what he believes. That's pretty weak evidence for "the problem". The only nation that ended up containing it was China, because being able to tightly control what your population does is one of the perks of authoritarianism. That said, it doesn't make it a good trade-off.
    • minikites 7y ago
      How is shrinking the government to blame for an inadequate government response? It seems self-evident to me, perhaps I'm missing something. Also, South Korea did a great job containing the virus, so authoritarianism isn't a prerequisite to addressing this crisis.
    • mdarens 7y ago
      the welfare state expanded dramatically after the new deal, but that reversed with the turn toward austerity in the late 70s. "the government" is an overly broad way of speaking about this, as it places budgeting for defense contracts & bailing out finance capital, or monetary policy geared toward preventing the labor market from getting tight (as opposed to full employment) under the same umbrella as tanf & snap.
      • refurb 7y ago
        The only time the welfare state in the US has actually gotten smaller was Clinton's welfare reform in the 1990's. That was easily offset by things like Medicare Part D in the 2000's. People keep talking about "stripping away the safety net", but when I look at entitlement spending, it just keeps getting bigger.
• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's just the consequence of market economy. Everyone is under pressure to "cut out fat", make themselves "lean". That applies everywhere across the supply chain. First thing that goes is every redundancy, buffer and spare capacity - things that would mitigate a crisis like this. It's because the companies that "cut out fat" can grow faster, sell cheaper and profit more, compared to their competitors that have risk horizons longer than few months. What needs to be done is legally mandated buffers and redundancies (so that no one can gain a competitive advantage by omitting or removing them). Many countries had that after II World War. Unfortunately, out of the wood works came people screaming "efficiency!" and cut it all out.
  • zaroth 7y ago
    Have you considered what the cost of adding these “mandated buffers and redundancies” to the overall economy? Have you attempted to integrate these costs over time when there isn’t a pandemic going on, and made any attempt to determine the net effect? Have you considered that you can’t start a small business with buffers and redundancies? And that small business accounts for 50% of overall employment?
    • tonyhb 7y ago
      Yes. His point is that game theory and economic principles favour the leaner, therefore every company moves to max. efficiency with JIT supply chains and max leverage. The only way around this is regulation if we want to be able to withstand crises _without_ bailouts. That's currently not the situation, which is why bailouts happen.
      • chrisjc 7y ago
        Agree with you completely, but how can we regulate domestically and expect companies to survive when the external competition doesn't have to abide by the same kinds of regulations. Edit: the obvious answer is tariffs, etc... but we haven't seen any real action like this until recently
      • zaroth 7y ago
• wmeredith 7y ago
  This is hubris talking. Nature can humble us at any time and we can do little-to-nothing nothing about it. Not to say we shouldn't try. But humanity vs the worst things that the environment can dish out–super volcanoes, asteroids, super bugs–isn't really a contest at all. CoVID-19 isn't even an extinction level event.
• cloverich 7y ago
  Because people previously (falsely) believed it could not happen in the US, with the last true pandemic being so far in the past. The Bill Gates TED talk from 2016 shows that some people understood what we should have done, but it involves not only changing minds but also putting money into it. Whatever the total fallout from this pandemic, I expect the creation of a medical reserve (as suggested in the talk) is one that will certainly happen.
• lossolo 7y ago
  > thousands of years and wireless comms and rockets to the moon Every society is three meals away from chaos.