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When I read the headline I thought this article might be about domestic terrorism in the US. When I clicked on the article I saw it it was in fact about COVID-1
by Atlantium 6y ago
When I read the headline I thought this article might be about domestic terrorism in the US. When I clicked on the article I saw it it was in fact about COVID-19.
This is how I test my assumptions.
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoHuh. I guessed “potato famine”
- jedimastert 6y agoI was just thinking about a comment about how the current situation could lead to a US "Troubles"
- brundolf 6y agoI thought the exact same thing- "The Ireland Event" being the Catholic-Protestant conflict in the latter part of the 20th century
- Accujack 6y agoI was hoping it involved Guinness myself, or better yet Smithwick's. I'd be okay with multiple events like that.
- f430 6y agoI love your humour during these times, also thought by "Ireland Event" he was talking about "The Troubles" coming to America and clicked but I guess we have different stereotypical images of Irish folks.
- bklaasen 6y agoWe euphemistically call that "The Troubles".
- hervature 6y agoI thought it was about potatoes
- dgellow 6y agoWhat?
- hervature 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29
- stretchcat 6y agoPotatoes, a new world food, were a monoculture in Ireland at the time. These days there are a huge number of potato varieties grown, so a devastating potato blight seems unlikely to occur again.
- legerdemain 6y agoThe Russet Burbank potato is 70% of the US market. A blight of this cultivar would be devastating.
- stretchcat 6y agoHow devastating? I expect few if any would starve; we grow more than enough grain to keep people alive. Potatoes farmers would be put in a hard financial situation, but they'd probably get bailed out and could replant with other varieties for the next season.
- legerdemain 6y agoI don't think the bar is as low as "could the government make enough gruel to keep you from starving." And, given the current experience with vaccine distribution, even that is not certain. Think of all commercial food products that contain potatoes that could no longer be produced for a time. Potatoes are a significant source of cattle feed. Potato starch has many non-food industrial applications. Perhaps we wouldn't have millions of deaths, but a year without potatoes would be an historic catastrophe that Americans would remember for decades.
- zinekeller 6y agoReally quck edit: this is probably the most controversial comment that I have posted here. However, without a proper survey I am still not convinced that someone will associate "the Irish problem" with the violence there. Take the discussion below with a grain of salt and I hope that you, assuming that you are in the west coast or Atlantic coast, consider if someone (a random person) in the Midwest will know this. To be fair unless you're somehow intune with Europe at that time an average American will not really know how really bad it is (they might have an idea that something bad is happening - but they might described it as mostly targeted attacks to leaders, not knowing about the civilian killings).
- perardi 6y agoI am a very average American, born in 1983, and I’ll admit that I have only the vaguest idea of The Troubles. My first real concrete memory of hearing of Ireland’s issues was the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. If you were born after 1990 in America, I am doubtful you have much knowledge of that era at all.
- selimthegrim 6y agoProbably that Jack Ryan movie with Harrison Ford was most people’s exposure of that era
- Symbiote 6y agoSurely the bombs in London and Manchester were international news at the time, at least throughout the Western world? Next you'll tell me the average American is unaware of the 7 July bombs on the London Underground, the ETA bombs in Spain, Breivik in Norway or the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo.
- majormajor 6y agoThe average American will have probably seen some coverage of those things, but for stuff that happened years ago that aren't closely tied to ongoing, present-day in-the-US issues, they won't recall many details.
- pimlottc 6y agoSame here. And it's a sign of the times that I felt relief that it was "just" about covid...
- gfodor 6y agoSame. Also a bizarre example of someone coming up with a better analogy than I've been able to muster about my own expectations, when in fact they did nothing of the sort.
- zinekeller 6y agoTo be fair, even Amazon's support team (or robot) have done a similar mistake last November (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/15/amazon-reunifies-ireland-and-apologises-for-troubles https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/15/amazon-re...).
- the_only_law 6y agoI initially thought the same, in part because I recall a HN comment yesterday predicting the US would see such events soon, comparing them to the troubles.
- labster 6y agoAnd I assumed it would be about the coronavirus, because the neurons that knew about the virus surge on the island answered first. And the framing of the event on "2 months" made me think of current events rather than distant past ones. Context is the hard problem in NLP, I guess.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]