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There's an awful lot of points on there that are true or partially true. But some things, like terrorism, loomed much larger then than they do today.
by MatthiasWandel 4y ago
There's an awful lot of points on there that are true or partially true. But some things, like terrorism, loomed much larger then than they do today.
- labster 4y agoNo. 3 on Russia and its threat is almost accurate down to the word. If you replace “quasicommunist” with “authoritarian dictatorship” (not a stretch) it represents the world as we know it.
- akomtu 4y agoTechnocommunism is the word.
- the_biot 4y agoI'm pretty amazed they called Russia. It wasn't clear to me at that time that Russia would become an out and out gangster state, even if the economy had turned into an oligarchy by then. It wasn't until some years after Putin came to power, when it became clear he really was a gangster running a country.
- ianai 4y agoIt’s kind of an extension of the resource curse.
- bigodbiel 4y agoHalf and half: nationalist mafia!
- hammock 4y agoWe also haven’t gotten the “uncontrollable plague killing upwards of 200 million people.”
- kzrdude 4y agoThe "catch on like wildfire" part was true though. One moment you hear about it on the news, the next (the next weeks) half your family gets it - talking about Omicron in this case. Thankfully very low lethality.
- monkeybutton 4y agoSeeing 200M as an upper bound and that the current excess deaths are around 21M from COVID, the prediction is "only" off by 1 order of magnitude. At most.
- naniwaduni 4y agoThe thing is, "upward of" denotes a lower bound, not an upper bound.
- monkeybutton 4y agoCool, "upward of" means "in excess of" rather than "up to". Thanks for the correction.
- kilovoltaire 4y agoHaha I always interpreted it as the opposite of that, but this makes much more sense!
- amelius 4y agoThere is a plague like this every so many years, so not difficult to predict.
- ianai 4y agoWe’re not entirely done with this last one yet, either.
- labster 4y agoHaving read Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague in the 1990s, a pandemic was the most obvious prediction possible. Only timing is the hard part. We got rather lucky that our research on SARS-CoV-1 was available in advance, along with the new development of lipids for mRNA vaccines. Without that, 1% death rate was certainly possible with COVID, if not the 2.5% predicted in the article. Which is still much better than historical pandemics like plague and smallpox in the New World. Though, uh, maybe all that research made pandemic possible in the first place. Anyway a miss by one order of magnitude on a virus that does exponential growth is really good but obvious prediction. Public policy should definitely plan to deal with outbreaks on this scale of death.
- jbullock35 4y ago> some things, like terrorism, loomed much larger then than they do today I'm not sure about that. The article is from 1997, after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, but before the bombing of the USS Cole (2000) or, especially, the destruction of the World Trade Center and the partial destruction of the U.S. Pentagon (2001).
- dehrmann 4y agoDon't forget the US embassy bombings in 1998. al-Qaeda was more active in the US than people remember.
- shrimp_emoji 4y agoPlaying the original Deus Ex echoes that. There was some anxiety about some looming collapse of society into terrorist/criminal anarchy.