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> It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
by twblalock 7y ago
> It's one thing to forgive someone for not having foresight but it's something else entirely to actively dismantle the fruits of your predecessors foresight.
A pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion. What should the government have cut instead? School spending? Social services? How do you think the voters would have responded? Remember that the budget deficit was enormous.
It's pretty hard to defend funding pie-in-the-sky ideas like global pandemics when people have concrete, immediate problems. Just a month ago, the concept of a global pandemic that would shut down a huge portion of the economy seemed insane to 99% of voters.
- wtdo 7y agoThe swine flu pandemic ended in August 2010. If it's really the same probabilities, I'm just gonna assume the aliens are already living among us.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoA pandemic seemed about as improbable then as an alien invasion People have warned about a global pandemic for decades, and there were a few near misses - Ebola in 2014, SARS, MERS. Bill Gates was quite vocal. It's a 100-year event, something that people prepare against. No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain! Next up in California: AR1Kstorm.
- philwelch 7y agoYou're not wrong, but a near miss can seem a lot like "crying wolf" to an ignorant populace.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoCall me tinfoil-hatted, but the ignorant populace is egged on by disaster capitalists, enabled by out-of-control campaign financing in the US. Catastrophe means profits, just look at the bailout package that just went through. Disaster preparedness needs to be overseen by actuaries, but we can't have that.
- barry-cotter 7y ago> No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain! Doesn’t that describe most of Florida and the Gulf Coast? In practice many, many people are willing to build on 50-year floodplains, and not in ways that leave a perfectly good house afterwards either. No houses on stilts or anything similar.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoI had to look that up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARkStorm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARkStorm Interesting.
- bencollier49 7y ago> No sane person builds in the 100-year floodplain! Oh, we do that all the time in the UK. They build super-expensive pokey houses with little postage-stamp gardens on 5-year floodplains and all sorts of idiots buy them.
- briandear 7y agoThey could have saved $100 billion by not building a train to Bakersfield that doesn’t even go to Bakersfield. Just a rounding error would have funded emergency preparedness for a long time.
- thedance 7y agoThe CAHSR could not have saved any money in 2010 because it wasn't funded until 2012.
- tehwebguy 7y agoYou don’t prepare for pandemic because they’re likely, you prepare for them because they’re devastating.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- manicdee 7y agoWe’ve known that pandemics were going to get more likely as international travel got faster and cheaper, and population density rose and absolute population numbers rose. These factors have been part of the horror stories that epidemiologists tell each other late at night when the lights are out: “so it was a normal year, and airlines reduced the cost of India to USA flights by 20%,” horrified gasps (the audience knows where this story is going) Pandemic might have seemed improbable to you as a layperson, but the medical community has been bracing for this for decades. The less seriously you take it, the less seriously your politicians take it and the less seriously pandemic preparation gets funded. https://youtu.be/6Af6b_wyiwI https://youtu.be/6Af6b_wyiwI