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It is disappointing that the US got all of the authoritarian surveillance that China did but few/none of the safety/planning upsides it could be used to bring. It’s the worst of all possible configurations.

I wish that extremely large government would use its vast resources to plan for large risks other than “people with guns/bombs/tanks/missiles/planes want to kill us”, and focus at least some of that on emergency preparedness. Why isn’t there a strategic nationwide domestic reserve of supplies for emergencies? I know this is what FEMA is supposed to be doing, but they are utterly terrible at it.

If we’re paying most of a trillion dollars each year for defense, why not defend us at least a little bit against stuff that might well happen sooner or later: giant fires, flooding, pandemics, big/long power outages, fuel shortages, water or food shortages, ice storms, et c? It’s really disappointing to see almost 100% of that money going to a system that is focused more on war (which is, to varying degrees, mostly preventable) and almost none to natural catastrophes (which are absolutely inevitable).

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That wouldn't line the pockets of the oligarchs and the good ol boy network, because it would require the money to actually go to resources and not just overblown accounting entries to cover the pocketbook lining in the first place. The DC elite say fluffy words in public but in private are almost to a person "fuck you I got mine" people. They take oaths but don't mean them.

It's the sad truth that greed is the largest part of it, which enables the oligarchs to buy the politicians in the first place. Then if some rare person does resist, there are a whole slew of tools to use against them to force compliance, usually in the realm of blackmail (this is what Epstein was). These tools grow even more powerful as the surveillance engine is expanded (and the truism to remember is that surveillance is about control, not security). lookup Thomas Drake and William Binney to find out what happens to people on the inside who actually care about security and not control.

Top down compromise of a centralized system makes the system increasingly trivial to control as the compromise progresses.

> It's the sad truth that greed is the largest part of it, which enables the oligarchs

Slightly related, and for anyone that might accuse the OP of using the term "oligarch" as too modern or too politically-motivated, I highly suggest Robert Michels's "Political Parties", a book written more than 100 years ago and whose subtitle says it all: "A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy".

I've just finished reading it (it had been on my to-read list for a couple of years now) and it's fascinating how prescient the writing in there is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Parties

Also worth noting that the political structures in 1984 are described in the book as "Oligarchical Collectivism" - not being in the US I tend to associated the term "oligarch" with Russia.

For anyone interested, the CBO published an excellent primer on military force structure here: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51535

I think it informs ideas about what branches, soldiers, civilians, and contractors do. Once you track where the money goes there are practical ideas to reduce defense spending, as well as dispassionate pros/cons of what’s been tried in the past.

At the top end. However, the electorate that enables it all is frequently xenophobic and racist, and combined with the lie of rugged individualism, the tack most Americans take is one of "every man for himself, except when fighting the Reds."

> That wouldn't line the pockets of the oligarchs and the good ol boy network

Step back for a minute and think about what you are writing and how you came to such a childish view of the world

I'd say his viewpoint is quite realistic and based on common knowledge. It's comments like yours that are childish.

If you really believe the structure of US expenses isn't heavily impacted by interests of a few rich, powerful men then I'd call your view of the world very naive.

People don't vote for flood protection.

They do like military spending.

I think sometimes folks wrap up the political will of the people in "oligarchy" simply because they don't like what those folks want or value.

People don't vote on things, they vote on other people. That's the first problem of modern democracy.

Second problem: to the extent people vote on politicians over things they promise, they vote based on what politicians say they will do (and not in absolute, but relative to competing politicians), not over what they actually do or have done in the past. Since politicians are not accountable for their promises, and the general population has a really short memory, the main impact of voting is as an indirect signal - politicians hoping for being (re)elected have to say and do the things they hope will win them the next elections.

(In other words: the control input to political decision making system isn't what the populace wants, but the prediction of what would make most people vote favorably.)

Three: people vote based on what the media they read tells them is important, which usually has zero relation to reality and relative relevance of things. I'm far from believing media sources (including social media) are bought and controlled by politicians - no, it's worse. All sides try to nudge and control the narrative, and not just the government, but also the private sector. No one wins that tug-of-war, but the end result is that modern media is a form of complete DDoS attack on population's cognitive capabilities. It's literally making the society stupid.

Voting for people means you can hold them accountable. They lay out their policies, if you trust the person and like their policies you vote them in. If they under-perform you vote them out. Along with a separation of powers to limit abuses, it works very well.

Voting for specific policies directly is often disastrous. Look at the way voter initiatives ring fence high levels of spending while also restricting taxation. Look at how Brexit became such a dumpster fire because a government and an elected parliament was compelled to try to implement a policy the government and a majority of MPs disagreed with. Voting for things not people inevitably creates a breakdown in responsibility, especially for complex policies that could be implemented in many ways and involve difficult trade offs.

I’m not against referendums in principle, they can work, but only if they are seeking permission to implement a policy supported by the government that is calling the referendum. In that situation the lines of responsibility are clear, and for an important decision it can make sense to hold a referendum.

I'm not 100% convinced that direct democracy is a good idea either. It has its own problems, as you point out.

Still, this part:

> if you trust the person and like their policies you vote them in. If they under-perform you vote them out

absolutely doesn't work in practice. One, there's no way to build trust at the scale elections are held. For any given politician, you can have maybe a couple hundred people who know them who could actually trust them. Everything above that requires transitive trust - trusting someone who trusts that politicians. However, in my experience, in the general population, the proper chain of trust isn't happening. People trust media outlets, which they have no basis to trust.

Compounding the problem is that in some countries, you aren't even voting for people, you're voting for parties. At the moment, there is no political party on the planet I would trust to do a good job in governance.

There are a lot of failure modes in the democratic system; it's probably worthy of a dense textbook (and I'm sure someone has written one). The incentive structures, the feedback loops, are all wrong for delivering good decisions. The only redeeming aspect of democracy in my eyes is that it's designed to enable bloodless transition of power. And, while I suppose that this makes it the best system, I'd really love if we could figure out a way to make it stop consistently producing idiocy.

>absolutely doesn't work in practice

It demonstrably does, elected leaders get voted out in well functioning democracies all the time. Do some incumbents hang on longer than seems right? Yes, but who gets to decide how long is right? The voters, whether you or I like it or not. Sometimes the voters screw up, but that's their right and it's their right to correct that if they choose to or not if they don't.

For me the key is to be a floating voter. Do not buy into the group-think tribalism of party loyalty, it's a mug's game. I say that, but I've voted for the same part here in the UK except for twice, but to me those two times are crucial. They were actually painful choices to make, but important decisions. To be honest I have also voted on party lines and regretted it. Those two times should really be three.

I really don't like representative democracy where you're voting for a list. It puts power in the hands of party committees, and makes those actually elected beholden to those who put them on the list. Elected officials should never be exposed to that kind of leverage.

You're confusing leaders with policies.

In a pseudo-democracy policy priorities are defined exclusively by the oligarchy, and the required opinions are sold to voters through media channels directed by think tanks and PR outfits.

Voters are persuaded they have a choice over personalities and superficial issues, but never over national policy.

If a politician appears to threaten the cosy consensus, the media wurlitzer goes into overdrive to smear them, talk them down, and persuade voters that they're "extremist", "not electable", and other stock tropes.

So - it doesn't matter if leaders are voted out if key policy goals never change. And as a rule they either don't, or they change in ways that benefit the oligarchs, not the majority of the population.

> It demonstrably does, elected leaders get voted out in well functioning democracies all the time.

That doesn't mean it works in practice. It may mean your electorate is tuning in to the media noise. The end result is usually that no long-term improvements happen in the country, because the first thing a new government does is undo the reforms and cancel the programs of the previous one.

> For me the key is to be a floating voter. Do not buy into the group-think tribalism of party loyalty, it's a mug's game.

That's table stakes for any human being with more than half a brain (unfortunately, most people aren't like that). But then you hit another problem. Last two elections (one internal and one for EU MEPs), I decided to learn more about the available choices of political parties and their programs. And I came from this with a firm belief that I cannot, in good conscience, support any single one of them. That's the negative side of voting for people, parties and programs. You don't get to express your true beliefs - you can only vote for the lesser evil, or abstain.

> Voting for people means you can hold them accountable.

Then how come the US Congress has extremely low approval ratings, but also extremely high incumbent re-election rates?

People tend to hate Congress in general but love their own representative.

Yes, which refutes the claim I was responding to. Everyone thinks the problem isn't their representative, it's all the others. Which means they never hold their representative--the only one whom they have control over with their votes--accountable.

I'm willing to bet there is a study about the effects of letting people who are elected be involved in the process of re-drawing the districts they are elected from.

I'm in the UK and frankly the level of gerrymandering in the US is appalling. I mean it's your system, I hesitate to judge generally speaking, but OMG is your system of redistricting screwed up.

> People don't vote on things, they vote on other people.

It's interesting that empirical evidence show that people rarely vote for something. More frequently, they vote against something. This explains the success of political attack ads but also opens the gate to incredibly cynical manipulation of the voting public.

If people could vote against disaster, they would. As it stands, all they can do is vote against a candidate that gets portrayed as pro-disaster though media manipulation.

The public if largely mislead on the risk of epidemics, flooding, etc. Democracy needs education to run smoothly.

There is many studies that show that the government aligns strongly with big money. Just look at the state of health care as an example.

What are the risks of epidemics that people don't understand?

I don't doubt money influences things, but also I don't buy into what seems like an all or nothing theory here that the only driver is money or some vague "money".

In an capitalist society money will be... everywhere in most every market. It's awfully easy to point that out.

> What are the risks of epidemics that people don't understand?

How exponential growth works, for one. Two, its implications on JIT supply chains modern society operates on.

In all honesty, money flow is the most powerful force on this planet. On the face of it, this looks like a pretty trite observation, but it isn't. What it means is that if you study the feedback loops and incentive structures, look at the market as a dynamic system, you'll see where things are heading - and that picture is very bleak.

For instance, you can be damn sure that no matter how badly this epidemic goes, the next one will be handled just as badly. All the problems: lack of tests, disappearing protective equipment, fragile supply chains - are a direct and predictable consequence of market pressures, which chip away all safety buffers, piece by piece. You can't fix this without reducing or removing the influence of market pressures in many points across our society - which is synonymous with the trite saying, "we need to stop X from being driven by money".

Exponential growth isn't risk.

The consequences of it are, and not understanding the nature of exponential growth also creates risk in itself (in the form of severely underestimating risk).

If you're hoping people would care about the topic because of risks....I kinda would hope that risk could be conveyed beyond "risk".

An example of exponential growth being a risk would be the risk of societal backlash when blue collar work is automated away at a large scale.

And to GPs point, those reaping the rewards of the growth are not those impacted by the first or second order effects.

> I don't buy into what seems like an all or nothing theory here that the only driver is money or some vague "money".

I completely agree with that. Right now the system is less than ideal. But, there is many people willing to fight for a better world. And cynicism is only going to make things worse.

Many wrong decision are taken in name of profits. But that can be changed, our well being, our planet are at stake.

We have time and will to make things better. I just want to point out that we need to work for it. It will not come for free.

I'd say you are letting preformed politically designed black and white thinking colour your holistic view of how the world actually works.

I assume you're referring to his lack of apostrophe in "good ol boy"

It isn't childish. It's the history of the US. From the very beginning to today. But that's the history of most nations around the world.

You might also want to check out "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler. Then you might want to check out why the oligarchs created the US in the first place. Had nothing to do with freedom or liberty. It was about land and wealth.

"Had nothing to do with freedom or liberty."

I have trouble with such a sweeping statement considering the volume of freedoms available and successfully fought for and gained in the US.

> I have trouble with such a sweeping statement considering the volume of freedoms available and successfully fought for and gained in the US.

You have trouble because you've been brainwashed by endless propaganda. I also used to be troubled as well. Also, my point was that those freedoms weren't why the founders fought for independence. The real reason was land/wealth.

The reason for the discontent wasn't "lack of freedom", it was britain forbidding western expansion of the colonies. We wanted land, the british wanted good trade relations with the native americans who supplied them with valuable fur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763

The american colonists were "proud englishmen" enjoying the freedom/liberties of all englishmen for nearly 150 years before the independence war? So why the sudden shift in sentiment? Because of wealth.

"Freedom, liberty, etc" are just war propaganda. Just like invading iraq to bring "freedom and democracy" to the iraqis.

You're ignoring all of the other impulses that led to the American Revolution to focus on the only one that supports your argument.

Take the Stamp Act. This produced the most ferocious resistance to that date in the colonies, in part because it was a tax increase to support something that most colonists didn't want (they suspected, rather correctly as it turns out, that the British army being stationed in the colonies was primarily a sinecure). But it also fueled suspicion that Britain was pushing other changes that pissed off other groups in the colonies--there was a specific mention of stamp duty for documents in ecclesiastical courts, which didn't exist at the time and were opposed by the majority of colonists. Or duties on diplomas that would hamper the growth of a professional class in the colonies, forcing them to rely on Britain.

And then there's the Intolerable Acts. In an utterly misguided response to a terrorist act condemned by the majority of colonists (Boston Tea Party), Britain decided to close the third-largest port in the colonies, abolish its legislature, and force trials to be held back in Britain (effectively abolishing the judiciary as well, at least for royal officials). This overreaction soured many colonists on Britain, as they saw themselves as potentially being next in line; nearly guaranteed imminent revolution, with reconciliation much harder; and ultimately turned a terrorist act into a symbol of patriotism.

The proclamation against settling the Ohio Valley may have set the speculators against Britain, but there were many, many other steps that Britain took to turn the colonists away from them.

> Take the Stamp Act

Money?

> Britain decided to close the third-largest port in the colonies

Money?

> Or duties on diplomas

Money?

> The proclamation against settling the Ohio Valley may have set the speculators against Britain, but there were many, many other steps that Britain took to turn the colonists away from them.

Yes. All of them were tied to money. British needed good relations with native americans in order to maintain their lucrative fur trade. Americans wanted native american land.

Pretty much every major founder viewed themselves as proud englishmen. Nobody saw themselves as pennsylvanian, virginian, etc. They all referred to themselves as proud englishmen and willing subjects of the british crown. Until the british crown screwed them over money.

There has never been a war over ideals. Every war is about wealth. The more a war wraps itself around ideals, the more it was truly about wealth.

The scale of freedoms alone would seem to clearly indicate freedom had plenty to do with the foundation and development.

You don't get those freedoms in an oligarchy as you describe it.

> The scale of freedoms alone would seem to clearly indicate freedom had plenty to do with the foundation and development.

The scale of freedom? The freedoms were pretty much "the rights of an englishmen", which the american colonists already had. For 150 years, the american colonists ( especially the elites ) enjoyed the rights of englishmen. The american "freedoms" pretty much stem from the magna carta and lockian/english principles. Nothing new and nothing special. I know, we are told it was "new", "special", "exceptional", "revolutionary", etc. All nations lie to their people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen

> You don't get those freedoms in an oligarchy as you describe it.

I know. That's why the founders didn't allow 90%+ of americans to have "freedoms" or the right to vote. It's why slavery existed after the war of "ideals and freedoms", women were property and the poor unlanded whites were 2nd class citizens.

The central reason for the american revolution and every war is greed of the oligarchs. That's it. Everything else is just saccharine fake facade to rile up the uneducated masses.

You may be correct, but your point could have done without the "you've been brainwashed" slap in the face - rather unbecoming of HN imho

> The reason for the discontent wasn't "lack of freedom", it was britain forbidding western expansion of the colonies. We wanted land, the british wanted good trade relations with the native americans who supplied them with valuable fur.

Dunno, to me that still sounds like "lack of freedom", it's just a matter of how you want to frame it.

uh oh

The leadership that people vote for are interested in "people with guns ...".

I know of no political will to restructure government to better handle a small pox attack. People vote on other topics.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the theory that China's "upside" isn't simply bypassing the media, ethical and other concerns noted in the article by simply controlling the media, information, and not dealing with ethical concerns.

I'm also a bit skeptical about what if any "upside" they have considering their controls on information.

I'm not sure you want that....

Yeah it has always been Propaganda that their unchecked power "helps the trains run on time". Even naively it is clear that there is a subset of power needed to actually make the trains run on time is vastly smaller than absolute power - it just wouldn't be exploitable which is what they actually want. They will complain about all limitations and scheme to seize it. The actual solution is to evaluate their claims in and refute them in detail and summary and fire the power hungry bastards out. Sadly this option is seldom taken or else we would have an Intelligence Aparatus which understands why trying to limit encryption when your international economy depends upon it both directly and indirectly is a moronic idea.

Gentle reminder that just because you don’t know it exists, doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_National_Stockpile

Two minutes ago I just watched the mayor of New York City on CNN say that they don't have enough hand sanitizer or surgical masks for their medical infrastructure and that they have over twenty confirmed cases of coronavirus and are expecting more, and that the federal government has not provided them with any sort of supply assistance yet, or any sort of timeline on when they might.

The mayor of DC followed and said something similar.

The follow-up question is then "why is the government bleating about mask shortages"?

If they're worried about running out of masks now, the stockpile wasn't big enough for even a small pandemic, let alone a large one.

There was literally an article about it on the HN front page earlier this week, this comment should be higher.

I saw the responses they've recently made to hurricanes and fires and now the coronavirus, and they were all woefully inadequate. Just because they have a big building somewhere prepping for a smallpox attack doesn't mean they're in any way whatsoever prepared for the actual issues that people are having, today and in the recent past.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1235695757652459520.html

> The U.S. Congress appropriated funds for the CDC to create a pharmaceutical and vaccine stockpile to handle biological and chemical threats from disease that could affect large numbers of the U.S. civilian population. The original name was the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile (NPS) program, but since the original authorization additional materials have been added to the stockpile.

Again, I think this is way too threat-actor focused. I'm reminded so much of George C Scott's character in Dr. Strangelove. We're much more likely to end up underwater or on fire or without crops or with a water shortage or with a novel virus that simply evolved than someone seeding bioweapons for which we already have medicines/vaccines. This simply isn't about responding to an attack. It's about helping people stay alive when the normal order of society goes tits up. We've seen this again and again, most recently in Puerto Rico and California.

If the federal government has prepared for this in any meaningful way, we've yet to see it out in the field during previous disasters. We have, however, seen them manage to continue to wage the longest war in US history, whilst people in Oakland were making zip-tie homemade not-quite-HEPA filters and wearing "face masks" made out of bandanas because available civilian supplies everywhere had run out when half of California caught fire, to say nothing of the death toll resulting from the long-running power outages in Puerto Rico after Maria.

I really don't think a warehouse full of vaccines and antibiotics sitting in DC is any help to the people in diabetic comas in San Juan because their insulin fridge's generator ran out of fuel after weeks of no power, nor will it be if due to the coronavirus spreading too much, ICUs across the country are swamped with cases of viral pneumonia.

I hope I'm wrong and that the federal government is going to magically pull something actually helpful out of their ass if this thing goes big, but I would put my money on them being about as helpful as they were during any other recent large natural disaster affecting US citizens: approximately zero.

Also, TFA refutes some of the claims at the Strategic National Stockpile Wikipedia page:

> There is no surge capability in the U.S. healthcare and public health systems,[5] or in the pharmaceutical and vaccine industries.[4]

Why isn’t there a strategic nationwide domestic reserve of supplies for emergencies? I know this is what FEMA is supposed to be doing, but they are utterly terrible at it.

Read the original enabling documents for FEMA and you'll be surprised at what they actually had the power and funding to do.

> If we’re paying most of a trillion dollars each year for defense, why not defend us at least a little bit against stuff that might well happen sooner or later: giant fires, flooding, pandemics, big/long power outages, fuel shortages, water or food shortages, ice storms, et c?

The best answer is that the federal constitution gives the Congress the authority to fund a navy and an army, but is silent on the matter of 'giant fires, flooding, pandemics, big/long power outages, fuel shortages, water or food shortages, ice storms &c.' — and due to the Tenth Amendment, that means that the states are individually responsible for that.

I think that it'd make sense to pass an amendment to give the federal government some power in this area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_Proper_Clause

That merely states 'The Congress shall have Power … To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.'

Congress has the power to pass laws which are necessary and proper to carrying out the powers the states granted it in the Constitution. That doesn't mean that it has the power to pass any laws whatsoever, and even if it did the Tenth Amendment would supersede it.

The Constitution simply doesn't grant the United States general power to deal with natural disasters, so there is nothing necessary and proper for the federal government to do.

...and yet we have the Deparment of Education, FEMA, and the Department of Health/CDC.

> Why isn’t there a strategic nationwide domestic reserve of supplies for emergencies?

There is: https://www.phe.gov/about/sns/Pages/default.aspx

Surveillance and Big Data weren't a big thing in 2001. Shit happened after 9/11.

I think there is far less surveillance than everyone thinks.

I think that you thinking that is not an accident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

The lower bound on Forbes' estimate of its capacity is 3 million TB, and it consumes 65MW.

What precisely do you think they are storing there?

> Binney has said that the facility was built to store recordings and other content of communications, not only for metadata.

> The project had been designed for foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection but, Binney alleged, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, controls that limited unintentional collection of data pertaining to U.S. citizens were removed, prompting concerns by him and others that the actions were illegal and unconstitutional.

FYI, 3 million TB is enough to store 1 copy of the data that transfers over the Internet in the US for about a 15 month time span. It's not enough really, because in addition to the Internet data, they'd have to be storing cell phone data and potentially other sources of information plus all the metadata needed to organize it into something useful.

More importantly, sorting through that amount of data to find anything is nearly impossible, even if you have 65MW of servers running. Even the entire Amazon cloud would have difficulty, simply because of the scale of the problem.

So yeah, they're storing a lot of data compared to the average corporation, but not compared to the amount that exists nor are they storing all data that gets transferred. It's just too much.

From a certain point of view, there's less surveillance going on than you might think, simply because collecting everyone's information all the time is impractical to do and pretty useless.

We have lots of hard documentation about how they filter and select for what to store from the internet traffic. Nobody has ever asserted that they store 100% of internet traffic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore#Workings

https://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/xkeyscorerules100.txt

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/nsa-targets-users-of-privacy-s...

https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/31/4574532/xkeyscore-data-tr...

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/31/prism_put_in_the_sh...

> The cover has been blown on an NSA program which collects data on “nearly everything a user does on the internet” even as the debate rages over the secretive US agency's mass surveillance of innocent people.

> The XKeyscore program covers emails, social media activity and browsing history

That's more than enough to store emails, unencrypted chats/messaging, gsm and voip phone records (metadata, and voice where available), GSM HLRs, and SMSs for all time; that's also the lower bound. Presently I'm sure it's expanded to parse and store as much metadata as possible that's ingested/processed by private data brokers as well, which as we now know are receiving copies of timestamped, precise GSM location data from many consumer apps.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/07/a-dozen-popular-iphone-app...

That original capacity estimate ranges up to 12EB and also was dated 2013; I would anticipate it to be at least 2-3x that by now, to be more like in the 10-40EB range.

That's my point, actually. People tend to assume that anything they do is being watched, where the truth is that whether or not a given item is stored depends on whether someone has specified it's interesting somehow, or whether a trained program has.

They don't store everything in case it's needed, nor do they have programs capable of detecting everything people suspect is monitored.

It's still an invasion of privacy and probably breaks various laws, but it's not the complete surveillance people tend to think of, and it's not as useful as you'd expect given the money invested and the effort put in to it.

> People tend to assume that anything they do is being watched

I'm pretty sure "every email, private message, text, search query, hostname/ip connected to, and call log of phone call you make" is pretty much "anything" for the vast majority of people.

Of course you say that here. What do you say when they're not watching you?

well not to excuse FEMA for issues it has had but you are guilty of the same issue many other are, you grossly underestimate the true scope of the problem you are suggesting we gear up for.

I remember all the bellyaching over the response to Katrina and FEMA if not other Federal agencies which paid lip service to the area affected but not the realization of that meant. Hint, the affected area was the size of Great Britain.

Comparing how China does it ignores that we don't truly know how China does it. We get what comes out of China and then end up having to rely on sources that may not be reputable for more truth. They simply can make history what they want it to be, even WHO didn't stand up to them as others have completely collapsed when it comes to pursuing cornavirus and previous flu related strains that just magically appear in China.

Back to FEMA. Understand that each state and locality all also contribute to disaster preparedness but it all comes down to what will likely happen and how to get resources to the affected groups. Many of these groups are loathe towards any relinquishment of authority to the Federal government; heck some cities don't even care for state intervention. Worse some of the combativeness occurs just because of political party differences! So coordinate your national response with fifty states and how many cities? We are setup so that a Federal government cannot just curb stomp a state's rights.

By the way, not only do we spend nearly a trillion on defense but that is less than twenty percent of the Federal expenditure. There is a lot of money that can be better used but the default of just blaming the defense budget grows less and less useful when as a percentage of the budget it is falling behind; not fast enough but both parties seem quite willing to prop it up

Indeed,

It seems like the state spent vast time and effort to "find weaknesses" but didn't, say, correct the frickin' weaknesses.

Bureaucrats with so much latitude they can spend their entire budget on entertaining war games rather, say, emergency medical supplies.

I suspect many of the changes have to be legislative.

I don't think most of those organizations can simply restructure themselves at will to deal with a potential small pox attack.

That doesn't occur in some sort of "oligarchy" as you describe it.

That would require, you know... honest effort.

It is well known bias to under or overestimate rare events. It requires discipline and honest effort to properly estimate probabilities and attach them to possible effects and then follow through with proper response.

A special category is events that might end civilization/nation/locality etc. as we know it. Compared to more mundane problems, you want a special kind of insurance against them.

In the infinite game the objective is not to beat everybody else but to avoid those special events that might end your ability to play altogether.

The problem is, like always, other people.

The market is built on lots of small actors doing local, short-term optimizations. So let's say you're a supplier, and you come up with a disciplined, honest estimate of a buffer you need in your supply chain to cope with the next epidemic. This raises your costs, and as a buyer who cares primarily about next quarter's report sheets, I'll go with your competitor who doesn't include any safety margin, because they'll be cheaper. Will this land me into trouble in a few years? Probably, but that's out of scope of quarterly reporting, and thus not my problem.

Ultimately, the society is enslaved to the aggregate market pressures. We won't fix things until we can figure out how to build safety margins into the market and make them stick.

That's why people created that government thing, that isn't subject to market pressures.

One could only wish it was true. In reality, the government simply has much higher inertia.

Sometimes inertia is all that is needed...

Unless there's rapid production of a vaccine or an effective antiviral drug, I think China's system probably won't help them that much. There will be too much opportunity for reinfection from the rest of the world, and inside China as they have to relax restrictions to keep production going.

...climate change.

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