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2019-nCoV

This outbreak is a litmus test for the competence of countries. It's already shone a bright light on the fragility of global supply lines, cheap travel and open borders. These are the aspects of life most likely to change after this is all over.

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>These are the aspects of life most likely to change after this is all over.

People will forget about this in a year and go back to life like it's always been. Short term convenience trumps everything except short term negative consequences.

Not for something this big, and for something that won't go away for 18 months MINIMUM

Sometimes, I wonder if even that last part is the case. A lot of people do absolutely insane things for short term convenience.

No. I remember 9/11, and this feels worse. The world won’t be the same for a decade. Are you too young to remember when you could just walk straight onto a plane without being searched? Those days never came back.

I remember 9/11, saw the second plane hit with my own eyes. Other than airports and flying being more inconvenient nothing fundamental really changed as I saw it. People still traveled, people still flew and so on. Now you just budget an extra hour before a flight.

Geopolitics has seen massive impact since then. For example, the rise of ISIS is a direct descendant of the Iraq war which is a direct consequence of corrupt and criminal decision making by the Bush/Cheney admin in response to 9/11.

Debatable if the Arab Spring would have occurred without it, as the Middle East might have been much more stable.

Sure but the comment I responded to wasn't about geopolitics but daily life changes.

Because geopolitics does not change daily life? Damn, you should see some geopolitics where I live.

Hear hear. And war refugees entering Europe is causing right-wing populism to rise (not that years of stupid austerity polcies was helping).

Would Brexit have happened without 9/11?

There's an ancient TIME article I have in my archives highlighting how the Dubya admin ignored Clinton's intelligence team's attempts to hand over info about the threat of a terrorist attack in the US. Would 9/11 have been prevented if Gore had won 2000? God damn hanging chads and rigged elections...

Pretty much the US just introduced the security measures other countries had had for years before.

The TSA has been proven many times over to be totally ineffectual security theater - theres this popular report from a few years back that the TSA has a 95% failure rate when their measures are tested[1].

It doesn't go anywhere because there is now a lot of private industry in it for contract money to supply the spectacle whom have the lobbying power to keep it in place, but it is a total waste of money and gross violation of privacy for no positive benefit to society.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tsa-fails-95-percent-tests-ho...

Ok, I misspoke : the US introduced less effective security measures than other countries had before.

In particular you'll see other countries focus on measures like interviewing (briefly) the passengers as they board.

From now on, a serious pandemic will never be some weird future scenario ever again. It will be a politicized issue.

We are seeing a real pandemic - something that has been the stuff of Hollywood movies for most in our generation. Maybe it's comparable in some aspects to the only other WHO-official pandemic: HIV/AIDS.

But this has an order of magnitude more impact on the entire planet and societies as we know them.

The stock markets look like load test graphs I see in Grafana every day. Steady ramp up and then after 90 minutes boom its over back to 0.

I think more of the 2004 tsunami.

America is still not the same. I'm not talking about airport security, although that's a minor, minor difference. I'm talking about the government, the society, the culture. The terrorists won on 9/11 and they've been winning every day since. America is not a free country, if it ever was. The surveillance state has been ramped up. The police state has been ramped up. Wars have been ramped up. We started a war with a completely unrelated country and killed millions. Life for most citizens is absolute shit, barely making it by.

9/11 was not just a battle. It started a war the terrorists have been winning ever since. That's probably why there haven't really been any major attacks since then. Why try to attack America when us idiot Americans are attacking each other and bringing down the empire ourselves? The terrorists are just watching with glee.

The American ideal was land of the free and brave, and the writing at the Statue of Liberty welcomed poor refugees. But now Stephen Miller sits in the White House and is whispering Nazi ideas into a senile infant's ear.

> I remember 9/11

It's not the same stuff! Terrorism is backed by people actively wanting to harm other human beings, while the appearance of a new dangerous virus is a random process.

I can imagine that the one thing people will remember is stocking up on supplies.

Expect even emptier shelves way earlier when the next epidemic comes.

People stocked up supplies all over Europe when Chernobyl happened. This is not what we remember most. What we remember is "nuclear is dangerous". Some countries decommissioned their own power plants and didn't build new ones anymore. Example: Italy.

I'm sure that if everything ends well I'll remember being at home for a few weeks. I'm sure this is going to be a major turning point in history (more than Chernobyl and 9/11) but I'm not betting on what's going to be the direction it takes.

In a year, it might still not be over.

Re cheap travel and open borders, Jiangsu province, China is 300 miles from Wuhan, has 21 active cases, 610 recoveries and 0 deaths and presumably cheap travel and not much borders to Wuhan. On the other hand the US say is expensive to travel to and has a leader that goes on about closing borders, 2000 cases, 41 deaths and rising rapidly. The difference is competent policy not borders and cheap travel.

I'd like to hope, wishful thinking here, that there might be a trend towards requiring more scientific competence in our leaders going forward.

> It's already shone a bright light on the fragility of global supply lines, cheap travel and open borders.

Are you serious? Those are the things that have given us so much prosperity in the last decades, and indeed no government has dared interrupt the flow until it has become unavoidable due to major national heath danger.

Which is a major failure in risk assessment. You know, that thing capitalists are supposed to be good at.

IMHO one consequence will be death of neoliberalism (started with Reagan/Thatcher but going philosophically to Hayek and Friedman). It is quite likely that U.S. will nationalize health care as a response to this crisis. But more broadly, the idea that government is a useless economic actor and shouldn't dictate economic policy will become laughable in the response to the crisis.

> It is quite likely that U.S. will nationalize health care as a response to this crisis.

If you think half the country infected with a virus and a million deaths is enough to topple a several hundred billion dollar insurance racket that has endured for over half a century exploiting health and wellbeing for profit...

I wish we would get single payer out of this, but the plague of greed in medicine is way too deep to be excised in a few months from a regular old viral plague.

I think you should stop saying it is impossible. You know, billions just vanished on the stock market.

If enough people will believe that it is possible to change, it will change.

I agree although the racket is more like a trillion. It is not just the insurance (payors) but also all the brokers and other rent seekers. I think there is 0% chance of nationalized health care in the US. Look at Obamacare; it didn't really work and took forever to get passed and most of the regulations have been rolled back. There are other things that I think could fix our health care and actually get passed and stick but Medicare For All isn't it. Too many in the US associate socialism with communism and think it unfair.

That mindset is a bit self-defeating, isn't it? I wonder if people thought we would have public schooling in the country 150 years ago, or that blacks could go to school with whites 100 years ago. Or that Germany would be the largest economy in Europe as a democratic republic, 70 years ago.

Things take time.

Do you remember ebola? I don't.

Ebola never got to America.

I am not American, and there were infected people in my country. We had a right wing government then also, and since all the media is left wing here, they made an incredibly huge deal out of it. And now nobody remembers a thing.

Ah sorry, forgot we are not the center of the universe as usual.

You are referring to the West African Ebola epidemic that started in 2014. There is also an ongoing outbreak in the DRC that started in 2018. That probably isn't receiving much international support right now.

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