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A 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 - Ebol
by HarryHirsch 7y ago
A 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.