> We now feel that it is "over", so we relax instead of buckling down and asking ourselves "how can we make the next time this happens not such a shitshow?" Th

> We now feel that it is "over", so we relax instead of buckling down and asking ourselves "how can we make the next time this happens not such a shitshow?" The cultural rot that prevents iterating on effective government runs deep, and has little to do with exhaustion. In _Spring 2020_, i was shocked by the strong reaction I got from my friends at even passing mentions of the FDA/CDC's significant and severe early failures. In the usual reductive framing, I'm a pretty "big govt" guy. While govt is horrendously incompetent, as a baseline, it allows us to choose from a wider array of goals, more precisely than the market does. But I learned that even my nominally-intelligent friends are too simple-minded to understand this, and that their support is rooted in religious belief in an omnicompetent govt that provides flawless protection from the world's dangers. An environment that can't even see failures is not one that's going to improve upon them. Already, the excuses have been lined up: every single failure was due in some way to Trump, and now that he's gone (hopefully), the gov't can go back to its usual, hyper-efficient mode of function (lol)