A Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming
nautil.us
nautil.us
I would encourage folks to read the article with an open mind as the "he saw it coming" is not really the point of most of what is said here.
This is is an expert who understands the realty of zoonotic spillover, and how it is going to become a more prevalent threat over time, and how to deal with that threat.
Of course - because it's a silly title. Give an article a silly title, expect silly comments.
We should hold everyone to a higher standard than that.
(At the very least, if the headline isn't enough to get you to read the article, avoid commenting on it.)
This is my key takeaway. A lot of the damage is in the end self-inflicted. People seem not to be able to act cohesively at an inter-national scale, not even within a country group that is supposedly designed for that.
Whether it's pandemics, global warming or nuclear weapons this lack of cooperation shows up again and again.
Edit: As an example: I would like one bottle of hand sanitiser. That should last quite a while (nobody needs boxes and boxes of the stuff) and it would be very useful. I cannot buy it anywhere either IRL or online. As a last resort I just checked eBay. I found a 500ml approx bottle of Purrell for £17. Insane but given it would be very useful to have I almost bought it. Then I noticed the postage price was £100. The crazy part is that this person has sold quite a few of these according to eBay. You can claim this is the free market and supply/demand etc.etc. all you want but that doesn't make it ok. It's still incredibly selfish behaviour.
Edit 2: Any explanation for the downvotes? I almost self-censored my comment on the free market as I thought it might lead to downvotes - decided to go ahead with it anyway. If you disagree with anything I've said starting a discussion is much more productive than hiding something you don't like.
I disagree… "before the virus has even taken hold" is the perfect time to do long-term shopping. Avoiding crowded areas (read: THE MALL and the public transports to get to the mall) is key to reducing infection.
Yes, hand sanitizer/face mask markets are ridiculous right now, but that's to be expected. It's not people being selfish, there's clearly genuine needs for it. When there's a fuckton of needs and not enough being produced… how is it people being selfish that you can't find hand sanitizer at a decent price? All those have been bought.
The problem appears to combine habitual shopping for long term (not many have a 24/7 convenience store within 3 minutes of walking), panicked distrust in infrastructure reliability, and good old tragedy of the commons.
Some countries fare better on first two, but still have the last one (e.g., Hong Kong).
COVID-19 isn't going to be some world ending thing, it's just going to put some supply pressure in the short term until production and distribution can ramp back up, but people are treating it like it will be. It's really frustrating.
If nobody hoards, everyone is fine.
If a small number of people hoard, there are stock-outs, and everyone else has no access to the thing.
Ergo, the strictly dominant individual move is to hoard ASAP. As it provides coverage against all scenarios.
Limiting quantities is the obvious equitable response to this, so it's been good seeing retailers step up and do so.
While I agree that being prepared is important people are stocking up for much longer than necessary + not considering other people. This all depends on your ethical/world view I suppose but we don't have enough of certain items yet. The options are to think of only yourself and buy as much as you can as quickly as you can (while leaving other people with no options at all) or buy what you need now so that everyone has what they need and hopefully production can increase of the in demand items so we can all stock up before (worst case scenario) production has to cease entirely for a period of time. It's interesting to see how quickly our progressive societies can become every person for their self (to an extent).
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/sars-cov-2-study-c...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/14/8116090...
Doig the kind of shopping right now is extremely disruptive if happening at scale. Which it does. Long-term availability of all kind necessities will suffer from it, for you, for everyone. It is the opposite of reasonable right now.
Then, follow the guidelines (washing hands, ....). Avoid big groups, keep a certain distance. Regarding shopping, buy normal volumes of stuff. That always works, the system is used to this. If there are things missing, buy small volumes. Spread shopping over multiple shops of multiple chains. Ideally over multiple days. This keeps peak small, reducing the risk of supply disruption.
And keep away from things medical professionals would need as well.
If push comes to shove, accept shortages of luxury stuff and certain products. But we are very far from that.
All that is a European perspective, so.
From an American perspective, that is not immediately clear to me.
>Avoid big groups, keep a certain distance.
...
> buy normal volumes of stuff ... Spread shopping over multiple shops of multiple chains
These two things are not compatible in my view.
>If push comes to shove, accept shortages of luxury stuff and certain products. But we are very far from that.
Maybe where you are. My grocery shopping trip this morning ended with me re-planning meals for the week in the supermarket based on what was available. A wide range of staple ingredients were completely out of stock.
We might see shortages for stuff coming from China, inventoires will slowely be depleted and the replenishment from China severly hampered by the situation in Europe and the US. Stuff sourced / produced on the same continent won't hit nearly as hard. As long the production doesn't break down there shouldn't be to hard impacts. And since quarantine measures only started a couple of days ago, we can rule out those impacts as causes for the shortages you saw. Leaves short term and mid term disruptions caused by, what I might call, panic shopping, which outpaced replenishment.
Supply will be kept open, quarantine or not. Italy and China are the best examples, groccery stoes and pharmacies remained open. It is much harder to do that, so, if everybody goes panic shopping before. So please, don't do that.
Nobody is telling people to stay at home for long periods of time. If you think you have the disease you need to quarantine for a couple of weeks. That doesn't require a lot of stocking up. In Italy, where they are in 'lockdown', grocery stores remain open along with other essential services. So panic buying is unnecessary, causing shortages that are unnecessary and causing problems for people who aren't panic buying.
If you think you only need to budget supplies for two weeks, you’re just wrong. You need to budget for _months_, and likely need to budget many supplies you otherwise wouldn’t have needed, like increased food for daily breakfasts and lunches for a whole family who otherwise would have been at school / work drawing those supplies from elsewhere.
While I agree the panic buying is harmful & we could ration and space it out with less shock to supply chains, I also think the behavior of everyday people facing the sudden prospect of a large family consuming toilet paper, 3 full meals, soap, medicine, etc., for an indefinite number of weeks ahead, it’s totally understandable and not even remotely “selfish.”
Can you back this up at all? As I explained in my comment, Italy, one of the worst hit countries globally (and on 'lockdown') has grocery stores still functioning. The idea that people will be required to not leave their homes for months is fear mongering , impossible to enforce, and even in the worst case scenario people simply won't do it - they'll go stir crazy and give up a lot quicker than they think.
When you buy a stockpile of supplies, it is for contingency, not immediate threat. You are not accounting for this.
If the probability of being home quarantined is, say, 1%-5%, that’s huge and requires stockpiling at least some supplies. The grocery stores functioning today has literally nothing to do with it. That’s not fear mongering.
In the absence of hard data on the probability of home quarantine, then what do you recommend people do? Prepare for a worst case scenario? Act like nothing will happen? Somewhere in between (but where exactly, and why?)
I’ll reiterate, your responses so far are just glib rhetoric. Unless you can provide a reason why people shouldn’t prepare for a worst case scenario (knowing it’s unlikely to get that bad, but better to have the supplies if it does), it’s extremely disingenuous of you to brandish such moralistic grandstanding judgment towards people trying to prepare for an emergency.
The US population is historically suspicious of the government and it's ability to get things done, so individuality is much more pronounced there.
Secondly, I think the government, media and experts just haven't thought their communication strategy through. They've told people "you might need to get isolated in your home for a few weeks, and remember to wash your hands a lot". What, besides stocking up on food, soap/sanitizer and toilet paper, would you expect them to do in response?
I would have hoped people would keep in mind that staying home for a few weeks doesn't necessitate buying all that much more than a lot of families do in a "big shop". Take toilet paper as an example. The amount of it that's being bought by most people will last them 6-12 months. I know there's a lot of factors pushing people to make these decisions but it's certainly altered my generally optimistic/positive view of people as a whole.
Also, from my personal experience, it's a distribution problem. There is enough toilet paper, but it's sold out at some stores while others have more than enough. Can't level that out though, because margins are thin and the companies would lose money.
And from earlier times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_Kingdo...
It's a hive mind where dissenters are punished via down votes for hurt feelings.
Regarding people being selfish... There is nothing selfish about self preservation. The problem is we have a negative view on "price gouging" which is just economic triage.
There wouldn't be a run on toilet paper if it cost 10x the normal price. It costs you nothing to stock up, so people do.
No, but purchasing much more of an item that you are ever likely going to need (at the cost of everyone who isn't doing that) is selfish. Stock up on enough essentials to get you through a self-quarantine period (2-3 weeks). Don't buy enough to last the next 12 months because a) it's completely unnecessary and b) you're preventing other people stocking up enough to cover a self-quarantine period.
Two people at a grocery store, both with an entire shopping cart full of dried pasta. One has twelve mouths to feed at home, the other lives alone.
How do you police that or distinguish who is selfish?
This dress rehearsal hasn’t gone well.
We've wasted all the time China gave us.
China did it to themselves in the first place. They silenced the early warnings about the epidemic, and did not acknowledge anything until it was already too late in Wuhan. It could have ended right there had they been more serious to begin with.
There's a huge difference between looking good with small numbers because you haven't done testing like in much of Europe or NA vs looking good because you've blanketed the country in tests and are seeing recoveries outstrip infections.
This is a very different story in the US of course — but is it really only a leadership problem? Isn't it more of a systemic issue in the sense that now the weaknesses of e.g. certain centralized testing structures, not having universal healthcare etc come to light.
Trump might be the worst president the US could have at that point in time, because he acts actively destructive on top of a system that hasn't that much ressilience anyways.
And with all of that Merkel still said that 60% to 70% of the population will end up infected with the virus. It doesn't sound like Germany's going to be much better off than most other European countries.
In my country (Romania), our normally horribly inefficient government has closed schools the moment our 25th confirmed case was announced, it has banned events of more than 100 people, has encouraged people to work from home, and encouraged those who can't to change their work schedule so that people come in at different times to avoid mass transit overcrowding (and enforced this in public institutions). Many large shops have started limiting the number of people allowed in at once, preferring to firm queues outside. Flights to several countries have been canceled. And all of this in addition to screening travelers, putting everyone coming in from Italy/China/France/Germany/Spain in isolation for 14 days, as well as anyone who came into contact with a confirmed case, and of course tracking everyone who came into contact recently with an identified patient.
And all this is before we saw our 100th confirmed case, with 0 deaths so far. How can you say that the German response was efficient?
I am baffled as to why you would think this?
You can use the number of deaths to reason about the true infection rate, independent of the testing strategy. (Until something happens that changes the death rate, like the health system getting overwhelmed.)
For example, Germany and France started seeing cases at about the same time and have found about the same number of cases. But France has 10x the deaths. This suggests that Germany has found a larger proportion of their cases, i.e. they've got better test coverage.
This is simply not true. The response of the Merkel administration is one of the slowest and inconsequential in whole Europe. Very probably accompanied by deliberately playing down death cases and infection numbers in general if anectotical information and comparison with the numbers of surrounding countries has any value.
Tbh. the most important thing for me is that you listen to experts and don't overreact.
Otherwise okish response I would say. Also no indication for dow playing. Maybe a bit reluctant with shut downs of Carnevale, clubs and ski vacationing
https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/wie-die-coro...
Even at an individual level we're so used to thinking in terms of 'our country vs. the rest' that our ability to empathize with people from 'far-away' is impeded.
All this will let the virus thrive.
Moreover such pan-national tackling will let the apparently most adequate response be adopted, therefore if it fails too badly we may be all wiped out because it will fail everywhere.
Such a major pandemic is only possible thanks to our current population densities, massive transportation of persons/goods. Our central administrations were, as usual, patently totally unable to cope and even in some cases their very actions amplify the threat (cops in Wuhan silencing the local doc who early understood the threat, grotesque CDC actions in the US...), and are always pushing towards more densely populated huge territories for them to 'administer'.
... and further transportation of persons/goods and centralization of control should be in order?
Even if it were necessary, mitigation measures are neither difficult nor expensive.
Perhaps we could just leave it to the markets. They've done such a good job of providing robust and affordable healthcare in the US, markets can surely handle an international viral outbreak simply by maximising efficiency and ROI.
Mirioron answered.
> Even if it were necessary, mitigation measures are neither difficult nor expensive
The very reason why the virus spreads like it does February is because it is difficult and expensive.
> Perhaps we could just leave it to the markets.
The current state of affairs in the US, as in most countries, is crony capitalism, which has nothing to do with 'leaving it to the markets'.
Isn't 'maximising efficiency' the very raison d'être of the 'pan-national effort' you proposed?
Isn't it also the reason why huge amounts of humans live in giant and dense cities, with strong central government powers? From an organizational standpoint those are the main causes of the present crisis: total failure at detecting it early (the Chinese doc was censored), then at devising and implementing adequate measures (the faulty CDC coronavirus test is a prominent case, there are many others), and now at managing a major crisis (in most European countries the reality is that nearly no new potential case can be tested). And just wait for such a Supa Dupa Central Mega Pan-National Gov decision, applied everywhere, which will prove to be an error...
Centralization and transport are sure ways to enforce the pandemics. We may be reckoning that high population density and centralized power not only aren't usefully efficient because the efficiency gain they induce is mainly used to produce nearly-useless (at best) products, and that they are extremely dangerous. We may, instead, appeal to moar of all this.
Because of economies of scale and specialization? It's often cheaper for one place to produce a lot of a narrow list of goods and trade that for the goods they're lacking rather than every place making everything they use. This means that a lot of goods need to be moved around and a lot of people too.
>Even if it were necessary, mitigation measures are neither difficult nor expensive.
Like what? Shut down international travel? Test every person coming into a country for a new disease? Both of these are very expensive, especially the former.
And quite frankly: if your leader's decisions are worse than throwing a dice, why even bother having him? Because it is more entertaining?
In times of a pandemic you want to have something in leadership who does the unpopular thing, that ultimately stops the spread and saves the lives. Not someone who only thinks about themselves and changes their stance on the topic with every turn of the wind. But feel free to argue otherwise, if you know how the poststructuralist ways of trumpian confusion somehow help in times of a pandemic.
Often I feel that Europeans forget wet have state governments that have more local authority than the federal Gov.
Trump isn't some dictator. I'm perfectly happy with how my state officials are dealing with this virus.
Destroying that resource is squarely on turmp.
We've been watching the tearing down of the federal government since the Reagan years. We've witnessed the slow evisceration of everything outside of the department of defense.
The federal government could have and should have led a coordinated response to this. But now that the conservative dream of having a federal government big enough that it could be drowned in a bathtub is in reach, it's nearly impossible to.
This is the consequence of forty years of coordinated effort to hollow out the federal government from within.
States have very limited resources at their disposal. There's simply no way that they can coordinate the kind of response needed for an epidemic that knows no borders.
The US is probably doing terribly because of the CDCs absolute fumble of the test kit debacle; but assessing Trump's response as good or bad will take a lot of time. His border closures, believe what you will, were totally in character and probably good ideas for this specific crisis.
"During a Feb. 28, 2020, campaign rally in South Carolina, President Donald Trump likened the Democrats' criticism of his administration's response to the new coronavirus outbreak to their efforts to impeach him, saying "this is their new hoax." "
So while he didn't exactly, it doesn't show a person who cares for reality. Snopes says "mixture" on it's veracity.
> he's happy to have people on his task force who will publicly contradict him
You mean he doesn't care enough to put out the right information in the first place, and relies on being 'cleaned up afterwards' by his staff (who he keeps sacking)? He's made a mess of this primarily. The buck stops with him. The CDC does seemed to have fouled up badly but that doesn't exempt Trump's bizarre and dangerous response to a real crisis.
Trump banned travel from China in early February, and the hoax comment is late February. It is pretty obvious from his actions that he takes Coronavirus much more seriously than the flu whatever his public message.
> He's made a mess of this primarily. The buck stops with him.
Yeah, but we don't know how this plays out. There are a bunch of drugs against Coronavirus starting to complete clinical trials, so this may actually get nipped in the bud as far as the US is concerned. It is a real test of the Trump administration though, no argument there.
I've read patchy reports (eg, https://www.hngn.com/articles/228138/20200223/coronavirus-cu...) that the Chinese have started marking out specific drugs as effective for treatment. And of course Remdesivir is getting positive sounding press although I havn't seen any actual data.
It isn't really a question of whether we have something that works against COVID-19 because we surely do. The tricky part is figuring out what so it can be systematically delivered, and working out manufacturing. With a bit of luck (eg, chloroquine working out) the risk profile of the pandemic looks very different.
The fact that the richest nation on earth permits about 10% of its population no access to decent healthcare is morally repugnant. But even if one is not persuaded by the moral argument, perhaps the economic impacts can change views.
With no national sick leave policy, potentially infected uninsured citizens will have the incentive to go to work, raising the risk for all. Children of uninsured whose parents are unable to take sick or medical care leave may be shunted to older care givers who are most at risk. Uninsured families are acting rationally for their own economic circumstances, but creating a larger risk profile for all.
Let's hope Americans are sobered by this experience and consider a more sensible healthcare policy.
Also, we have similar issues with testing and shortages of obviously critical supplies here in Canada, as do many other countries. Can one man do that much damage?
Yes, I believe most of the issues at cdc are due to trump - so far he has fired the experts who can best work with the CDC to implement policies needed, and has censored and classified their attempts to spread critical information. He rolled back Obama’s executive directives regarding pandemic response simply to spite democrats, and now is rushing to reimplement those same directives, with much less effectiveness. It’s literally a government agency under his sole control - by definition the failures of the cdc are his failures. That’s how accountability works.
I know that he specifically said that it’s not his fault and that he doesn’t stand for anything, regardless it’s still his fault. This crisis is the most current proof that he is utterly incapable of being an effective leader.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/face-masks-in-...
Does skeleton in closet beat imaginary strawman?
Straight to rhetoric. One can characterise this as a strawman argument I suppose, but is it true?
I asked very specific questions, that can be answered. If you accuse me of framing, well...guilty as charged. In fact, I'm the one bringing this up.
> I never blamed him for lack of masks, so we can summarily move past that.
I never said you did, so we can summarily move past any insuation that I in any way made that assertion.
Please, argue against my words, not a distortion of them. And especially not while accusing me of using a strawman argument.
> Acknowledging that he is the cause of many actual issues is not fantasy.
I am not disputing that. Again, please argue against my words.
> In reality, the United States has the worst testing capacity and infrastructure of any developed nation - this fact has to be specifically trumps fault.
For you to know that is true would require some specific evidence, much of it quantitative. I've seen absolutely nothing even remotely resembling this, have you? Please note: the current lack of this data in no way proves anything one way or the other, and me asking such questions in no way requires that I believe it is false, or am making a suggestion - had I not written this disclaimer, that would have been a common rhetorical escape route. It is now closed.
> Obama was not caught unprepared during H1N1
Can you define "not caught unprepared" in more explicit detail? Specifically, can you provide a reference to inventory levels of critical care supplies over the last 20 years?
I have seen no such data, therefore I will continue to classify this as ~"Inconclusive - significant non-evidence based news that is highly narrative-based; numerous stories across independent media outlets all point back to the same 2 or 3 "fundamental" media stories (also narrative based). Biased reporting highly likely, even though their hearts are probably in the right place."
And again, none of this is to say I'm suggesting Trump has handled this well. He's handled it atrociously. I have zero doubt Obama would have handled it way better. But I suspect what really has gone on, is no one was prepared, not really. Beyond doing the standard "fund this 2500th "obviously a good idea" bill", I doubt anyone did too terribly good of a job.
If they did, but then this finely tuned, incredibly robust system fell apart in the span of 3 years under one rogue leader, with hardly anyone noticing....may it not be fruitful to investigate and discuss the actual events that occurred here? Is looking at reality, to the best of our ability to discern it, a bad idea?
I would support a full investigation into this. I welcome the full exposure of Trump's sins with open arms. Do you feel similarly unattached about Obama, or other parts of "the system" as it is? Are you willing at all times to reconsider everything you hold to be true?
And as for investigations, I think random members of the public need to start being on these investigations, like a variation of jury duty. I can pick out obviously misleading stories in the media as easily as finding cigarette butts on the ground. There is ample evidence that many fishy things are going on (think: reefer madness, racism, sexism, war propaganda & rationing), and the public's trust of media, government, and experts is unsurprisingly low as a result.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Did the US actually do widespread testing for H1N1? Or do anything at all?
My memory of the H1N1 outbreaks are that it was downplayed heavily in the media, and doing nothing was our response. It's pretty easy to do nothing. The way I remember it is that Asia did all of the heavy lifting by quarantining anyone with a fever.
Where is this number from? You aren't the only person that I've seen use it.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-pandemic-tim...
I see 1 million estimated in June 25, then by september we had done 1,000 test kits (which I assume have many samples).
> Your memory seems to be quite selective.
It was 11 years ago. Most of us don't remember what actually happened.
Edit to add: The biggest original difference in testing seems to be that the existing influenza tests worked for H1N1, then were easily modified for H1N1, while producing the corona virus test and running it appears to take far more time + we have shortages in sourcing chemicals because everyone is trying to get those chemicals atm. That 1 million number may be correct since existing tests that everyone can perform may have worked. That doesn't seem to have anything to do with who the president at the time was, or their actions though. I don't see any regulations being lifted/waived to make that happen. Do you remember that being a big deal at the time?
Where's the international cooperation? As the article mentions Bush and Obama were regularly on the phone with world leaders to coordinate their responses to the Avian Flu and Ebola outbreaks. This administration has done none of that and has effectively taken it's hand off the wheel.
Really? The US was the first country to stop flights from China, as far as I recall. Were there other leaders anywhere who did the same?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/business/china-travel-cor...
After a month from 1st infection, less than 2000 tests was conducted in the US. Right now, it's 12,000+ tests which is the lowest tests per million in the world.
Schools, theaters, theme parks are closed. Sports events are suspended.
What other evidence do you need that there is lack of leadership?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-...
We surely need to invest more into health policies and reaction to pandemics. We need to be more conservative about spending resources. We should communicate and coordinate better.
Right now I feel like a lot of actions just prevent the spread (good), but not so many measures for the long-term play are being instantiated. Let's hope I am wrong.
Personally, I think the current situation could be the beginning of a new and better era. It could strengthen remote work, less travel, less global dependencies, digitalization, local economies, and the environment. The next virus could be a lot more harmful ...
I’m sure epidemiologists and other scientists will learn a lot about the spread of pandemics and coronavirus. As a society though...
For an institution to learn there have to be consequences for failure. The US is so hyper-polarized that these won’t materialize for anyone involved. You can already see the circling of wagons and history being re-written in real time (on this site even). Investment in healthcare (including pandemics) will continue to follow party lines.
Because it's everybody for themselves. What do you want, a world government? Of course there is no coordinated answer.
Well, if it were reasonably run, why not? Imagine a world where the trillions going into the military were spent in other ways? Where people weren’t arbitraged across artificial boundaries? Would that be so horrible? So much more terrible than what we have now?
Of course, it will never happen. See earlier poster’s point about people not being able to cooperate.
The boundaries aren’t arbitrary; they reflect ethnic differences between groups.
Homogenizing people is an abhorrent suggestion — and without that, large governments don’t really work.
> Well, if it were reasonably run, why not?
This is extremely unlikely, because history has shown us that remote, centralized governments are generally both arbitrary towards citizens and ineffective at addressing regional needs.
Big, centralized government has killed 100M people in the past century.
> Imagine a world where the trillions going into the military were spent in other ways?
There’s basically zero chance that would happen, as a central world government would need a lot of force to keep regions following their edicts.
That you even suggest it shows that this isn’t a serious proposal.
> Would that be so horrible? So much more terrible than what we have now?
Yes, absolutely.
You seem to have a fantasy, not a serious view of how that would operate or the consequences to human well-being based on historic precedent.
It’s not that people don’t cooperate, it’s that what you’re proposing is dangerous and harmful, so people cooperate to oppose it.
no they don’t. they’re the result of a lot of wars and invasions. just look at a map of the middle east or Africa. or of china for example. low correlation between border and ethnies.
> Homogenizing people is an abhorrent suggestion
Ok, just for the sake of throwing gasoline onto the fire, why do you think that boundaries are a natural thing, and why do you find the mixing of ethnic groups abhorrent?
I didn’t say boundaries should be completely non-porous (as your comment implies), but rather that we don’t want to eliminate human ethnic/cultural diversity and that requires boundaries which enforce rate limited exchange. To borrow an analogy, there’s a reason cells have membranes.
Intermingling at a rate which allows each tribe to maintain its integrity is natural, and has evidence going back longer than writing. As does outbreaks of violence at exceeding that rate.
For example, Brexit was an act of political violence because the UK immigration exceeded the rate at which the society could naturalize immigrants leading to horrific events like “grooming gangs” of immigrants raping native children. Typically at the point gangs of migrants are raping natives, we drop the word “immigration” and talk about “invasion” or “colonization”.
Similarly, other lurches towards nationalism in Europe and the US.
Homogenizing everyone into a single global culture, which would be required to have a single government without boundaries that rate limit migration, would be verging on genocide.
Your comment assumes a very negative interpretation of what I said.
I didn't notice this sentence before. Did you edit your comment to add in this part? If so you should mention it.
In any case, given the tone of this particular statement as well as that of your previous comments I really don't think we can have a productive conversation, so I'm gonna stop replying.
Would it be by the term “immigration”?
I’m genuinely curious.
Not sure that it does :D
I'll address your points one by one:
> Boundaries are an expression of each tribe exerting an area of influence.
Modern boundaries, like modern nation-states, don't really work like tribes did. Prehistoric tribes tended to move around, didn't build fences or patrol them with armed guards and usually had a relatively vague concept of ownership.
In many places around the world boundaries were drawn by colonial powers according to their own interests and not by natives themselves. For that reason borders very often actually split cultures and lead to ethnic tensions (e.g. in the Middle East).
> we don’t want to eliminate human ethnic/cultural diversity ...
Fully agree.
> ... and that requires boundaries which enforce rate limited exchange
I really don't understand why you think this is the case. It seems to me you're operating with a mechanistic/thermodynamic model about how cultures work. It's simply not true that you need borders to allow diversity to survive.
Take for example the concept of linguistic continuum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum. This actually ante-dates modern borders and shows how you can have cultural diversity and cultural mixture at the same time.
> Intermingling at a natural rate which allows each tribe to maintain its integrity is natural, and has evidence going back longer than writing.
Again, tribes and cultures used to mix all the time and modern states are not like tribes (or ancient kingdoms or empires for that matter).
> Brexit was an act of political violence because the UK immigration exceeded the rate at which the society could naturalize immigrants.
While I agree that Brexit was caused by a perceived flood of immigrants, the act of violence is mostly self-harm. The public's belief that immigration is excessive and harmful was encouraged by certain political and economic interests and is not an objective fact.
> Homogenizing everyone into a single global culture, which would be required to have a single government without boundaries that rate limit migration
I wasn't arguing for a global government to begin with. However, again, I don't see why you think administrative unity requires cultural uniformity. We can, and do, have institutions that oversee multiple diverse cultures, both across nation-states (e.g. UN, EU, NATO etc.) as well as inside them (many countries are federations that oversee ethnically diverse populations).
These trillions would be spent oppressing you for a change. A "world government" cannot be anything but a complete bloody dictatorship.
One world government doesn't look like some utopian committee of experts making perfect decisions each time. It looks like Trump and Xi but multiplied by a million.
That definitely shouldn't be the case. Epidemics/pandemics are a situation of "we either make it together or we don't make it at all".
In a sense you're merely arguing for a collapse of civilization.
We're just not designed to be able to take third and fourth order effects into consideration in our day to day decisions at scale.
Just look at the current pandemic and this toilet paper stuff. We smoke, we drink alcohol, we don't count externalities in our consumption etc... The best thing we can do is build systems that nudge us to making better decisions in the longer term.
Prisoners Dilemma
Game of Chicken
However lack of cooperation has been solved in the past. We are not killing each other anymore (a backstab/backstab outcome of prisoner's dilemma). We coordinated cooperation here for shared values. It's time for better values. A good, simple set of values that everyone recognizes could spread very quickly in today's era of global light-speed communication networks.
If there had been no pandemic this year, but California had suffered from an overwhelming earthquake, this article would read "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Earthquake Coming." If a catastrophic series of diplomatic failures had led to a nuclear strike: "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Nuclear War Coming." 20 years ago there were plenty of "A Wo/Man Who Saw the Terror Attacks Coming."
And I'm not suggesting these people are crazy or out there on the fringe. Experts working in an area might agree what a worst case situation is, but disagree whether it is likely. If we took every worst case scenario entirely seriously, we would do very little else.
Learning from the past is important. But estimating the probability of things that have occurred is really difficult and counterintuitive.
The article is focused more on future viruses. A bad thing happened now which was preventable.
We've got no nuclear plant meltdowns and no nuclear wars, because we applied security procedures learned from the past to the present. We have less killer quakes because buildings are built to withstand earthquakes now.
Most of these things aren't totally expensive to fix. They're a chain of bad events and all you have to do is break the chain at the weakest point. The Spanish flu was so deadly because people tried to bury it with propaganda and no quarantine measures were in place. At least today, we've panicked and taken action early.
I admire your optimism, but I don't share it. Many are right now (and have been for decennia) foreseeing catastrophic effects of climate change (floodings, mass migration, disruption of ecosystems) and yet we fail to act. Health experts have apparently warned for years that we're not prepared for a pandemic (I believe they recently discussed this in NYT Daily https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/podcasts/the-daily/corona...). An additional problem is, like the other commenter points out, that many people see many crises coming all the time and there's no objective way to tell who's right and who isn't.
Preparing for every crisis that could potentially eventuate would come at the opportunity cost of doing anything else at all.
It's still okay that we didn't listen to experts like this last time. But this serves as a good wake up call. Avian flu didn't wake us. Swine flu didn't wake us. We were distracted when Spanish Flu came around. But let's not have this repeat too many times.
For starters, preparing for every crisis that could potentially eventuate, even for just a single category of crisis, would still come at the opportunity cost of doing anything else at all.
Also, what’s so special about spillovers? People suffer and die from all sorts of things every day.
Finally, what lessons do you expect people to learn from past spillover events? To not have contact with any non-human organisms? Spillovers happen all the time. Most human viruses come from other animals. Is it reasonable to expect we can predict which infections, out of the millions of spillover infections that occur ever year, are going to cause a crisis? Or predict when a typically self-limiting spillover infection is going to unexpectedly pick up a new transmission route? Or should all sickness be treated as if it were ground zero for the next pandemic until proven otherwise?
If person A predicts a stock market crash each year, person B predicts stock market boom each year, person C predicts stock market would remain level each year, then someone is always bound to be right.
Those who predicted peak oil was "right" when oil spiked in the late 00s, but then fracking happened and now we laugh at the peak oil crowd.
I believe it was an Ask Me Anything with Bill Gates on Reddit.
Someone asked Gates about a third world war and he replied he was more sure and worried about a pandemic.
I have no doubt others in the field had the same thoughts.
The most troubling thing is that a lot of leaders dismissed this information.
This is nonsense! Global pandemic was literally at the very top of many countries' national security risk registers! Everyone has been saying for decades that this was the biggest threat!
Trying to rewrite history to say that only some fringe celebrities saw it coming is bizarre.
Look at Matrix A - global pandemic listed as both likely and impactful.
Nothing happened because drastic measures were taken...
The West is addicted to lifestyles. Its near impossible for many people to consider changing their lives in any way - why should they? Nobody else does.
If anything, I hope that after this event is over, the survivors take a long hard look at who and what they are, in relation to each other. I hope we get over our decadence and realise that our 'safe' cultures are anything but safe, and that we all address the need to build better societies.
I've heard those farmers who breed those animals lobbied the chinese government to allow those farms. So in the end, they will not prevent those practices entirely. So it might happen again in a region where the government have less control. That's the scary part.
It's eye-opening that unscientific beliefs are actually endangering lives. It was true for anti-vax, but now we have reached a stage when ignorance reached a new stage of dangerosity.
> Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production.
This is not going to be fixed easily. Everything from the deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest to Chinese population growth is driving it.
It's clear that market capitalism isn't resilient or robust. Our engine must always run on red and sooner or later it's going to brake down.
For instance the fact that different countries are trying different tactics let's us compare between them to see what works best. Without nations we'd presumably have the same response everywhere, so we couldn't look to e.g. South Korea to learn anything. Singapore's previous experience in combating SARS wouldn't have gone anywhere because it wouldn't have reflected global priorities.
As for your last paragraph, that's just bog standard Marxist catastrophism isn't it? He was claiming capitalism's inherent contradictions would cause global collapse in the mid 1800's but he was wrong. It's been a standard refrain for centuries but where did this outbreak start? A communist country, that oppressed the doctor who tried to raise the alarm. Not great evidence for your case.
Marxist catastrophism? Never heard of it, but it very clear that the dogma of modern neoliberalism calls all other ideologies or opposing thoughts marxist. Is it not possible to critique our current system without being called a marxist? Marx wanted the means of production in the hands of the workers. I couldn't care less, I just want to be able to live in a society that has the ability to address problems that or not profitable in the short run. What should I call myself?
Marxist catastrophism is a very specific thing. It's not a fancy placeholder for "anything that's not neoliberalism" (a term which is arguably itself poorly defined).
Marx is famously known for a few slogans, but he spent his entire life writing. Marxist catastrophism refers to his written vision of the future in which, roughly speaking, capitalism would collapse into catastrophic anarchism due to its internal contradictions (as he saw it) and eventually be replaced with socialism. Interestingly this vision of his came to him as a young man, before most of his other ideas were well formed, and stayed with him his entire life. There's a good description of it in this biography of his life (starting page 52):
https://www.academia.edu/12009844/Intellectuals_From_Marx_an...
Johnson argues that his vision was primarily a poetic vision, that is, he saw the poetic vision of a society in flames and then worked backwards from that to derive his political ideas, which is one reason why they don't hold water and why he had to rely on various kinds of intellectual fraud to support them (like manufacturing quotes, using very obsolete sources, etc).
When you argue that "market capitalism isn't resilient or robust. Our engine must always run on red and sooner or later it's going to brake down." you are, whether you know it or not, walking a well trodden intellectual path. It's all been heard before but kind of like peak oil, didn't actually happen. Capitalism proved very robust, at least compared to the proposed alternatives. There have been quite a few collapse of communist regimes, but no collapse of any capitalist country. Even blowups like the GFC were over within two years and back to business as usual.
Business as usual.
Apart from that I agree. We forgot the ‘enlightened’ self interest part of capitalism. My wealth means nothing if the planet has to die for me to get it.
I'm all for creating brakes and maintenance periods.
Less globalism, less ability to freely travel == less risk to spread the virus from country to country. If anything, nationalism does the contrary of what you claim it does. In fact, by closing their border right now, countries are insuring that no foreign traveler is going to bring now CORONA cases to their country.
If nobody could travel to and from China, the global pandemic would not have happened.
Right. The ones that kill off their host quickly will disappear. With the SARS virus, it’s no surprise that killing 10 percent of its host, it wasn’t able to establish itself as a pandemic virus on this planet."
I don't think the 10% virulence is the reason (or the only reason) that SARS didn't make it to pandemic scale, I think it was everyone working against it and succeeding that time, which of course had the result of people thinking "hah, see it wasn't a problem, all those eggheads overreacting"
on edit: I think my main irritation is with the governments that did not put the proper preparation in the health systems (enough ICU preparation for example) for what was a foreseeable event.
You're right, after you kill that host you won't go anywhere but you will go lots of places that two months prior.
What makes COVID-19 so dangerous is the incubation period + infectiousness, not the mortality rate.
The Next Pandemic: Not if, but When:
"It's not if, but when there will be another recession."
"It's not if, but when there will be another pandemic."
"It's not if, but when another asteroid hit the Earth."
We live in the real world, things happen more than once.
> Coronaviruses are a genus of bugs that cause respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, sometimes mild and sometimes fierce, in humans, other mammals and birds.
...
> Another reason is that coronaviruses as a group are very changeable, very protean, because of their high rates of mutation and their proclivity for recombination: when the viruses replicate, their genetic material is continually being inaccurately copied — and when two virus strains infect a single host cell, it is often intermixed. Such rich genetic variation gives them what one expert has called an “intrinsic evolvability,” a capacity to adapt quickly to new circumstances within new hosts.
...
> Bats, though wondrous and necessary animals, do seem to be disproportionately implicated as reservoir hosts of new zoonotic viruses...
These aren't hard predictions.
This is not some armchair philosopher spewing racist things about Asians eating random animals being the root of all evil, but a clearly objective look at what probably causes things like this.
Here's a WHO page from 2016 that specificly mentions coronavirus type diseases as a risk: https://web.archive.org/web/20161220180509/http://www.who.in...
I've been telling my friends and family that they should be gathering extra food, medications, etc. if for no reason other than the coming supply chain disruptions. At first they laughed, but at this point they seem like they're actually mad at me, and in some senses blame me for the currently bare shelves in supermarkets. It sucks.
Because of the distrust in our government and institutions, people won’t believe anything until it’s way too late.
I’m also frustrated with the “happy talk” people, who think if we just stay positive, everything will be fine in the end.
I’ve must have explained a dozen times the difference between what happens when a virus has a mortality rate of 0.1% like the flu vs. Covid19 (on average) at 1–3%, which means it’s 10–30 times more deadly.
I was typing it so often that my iPhone was autocompleting chunks of my sentences!
I’ve already been invited to a less public discussion group on Facebook for people who get it and are sharing tips, strategies and information on getting through this.
I’m thinking about getting my cousins on a conference call to check where their heads are at.
The human mind is indeed fascinating.
Still if only one person was saved because of this, it was worth it.
We're at "just" 2 deaths and slightly over 30 confirmed cases, but we had the gates open for way too long and just this week people coming from Europe is "asked" to quarantine themselves, but the government doesn't want to suspend classes.
Nobody has started to blame me for the situation, but plenty laughed at me at the time when I tried to warn them what is coming. They have stopped laughing.
I have a certain friend who, for years, have been trying to tell everyone that normal food is bad and imported "superfoods" are the way to go.
Same goes for scaremongering of every other kind. I feel for everyone who warned about the corona virus in January there are 5 or 10 who warned about everything else which turns out to be a significantly smaller problem.
What is your motivation for doing so? Is it because you assume essentials will be unavailable because of other people stocking up, or because of eventual pandemic related supply chain issues?
Maybe I'm naive, but I just can't imagine that because of the pandemic society will be collapsing to a point that it becomes hard to obtain the food I need for me and my family.
2. To avoid buying food from the grocery store that may have been coughed/sneezed on and still have live virus on it. Stock up on non-perishables while they’re still more likely to be clean.
3. Anticipate shortages due to other people stocking up.
4. This virus came from an animal and can also infect animals. So maybe the outbreak infects animal feedstock and reduces our food supply. Or the outbreak infects Ag workers and reduces our food supply. Or the outbreak disrupts supply chain between farms and table. That kind of thing.
I don't anticipate the need to isolate but I figured I'd play it safe. I thought this was what others were doing, but now that I think of it I'm just assuming people think as I do. I personally didn't buy 40 rolls of toilet paper.
Additionally, if the virus is rampant in your area, you may not wish to go to grocery stores and risk exposing yourself.
There are already enough "it's just a flu" people out here I don't really want to wade into that any more than I have to.
Would most of the people who predicted COVID-19 escaping also have been able to predict SARS would have minimal effect outside of Asia?
(Don't forget that China had pretty aggressive lockdowns going on during SARS -- schools closed, gatherings limited, etc. -- though not to the level Wuhan got to).
At this point the only issue is how much we can delay the peak and minimise the time we are above the capacity of the medical system.
The sad thing to me is that there is at least one American company that still makes ventilators here in the states, but they reported that they haven't been asked to ramp up production.
They even make a simplified and hardened version of a ventilator specifically aimed at meeting surge demand during a pandemic, so the engineering effort has already been done.
- elective surgeries being canceled, hospitals cleared as much as possible
- medical students were ordered to stay in their residence area and are taking disaster medicine courses
- teaching students are volunteering to take care of children of medical personel (as all schools are closed, someone needs to take care of childrens & students are free to do so)
(Presumably uninfected patients with unrelated issues wouldn't want a sick healthcare worker, but that's not everyone.)
Compare the "Total Coronavirus Cases" charts: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Based on what’s about to happen, the schools won’t be able to reopen, because it’ll be too dangerous.
I think there's more the US should be doing.
> I think there’s more the US should be doing.
If you want more to be done, then politicians need to be honest about what we’re dealing with. Everyone, and I’m not talking about just Trump here, has been giving a lot of wishy-washy “well it’s not really bad, but it kinda is, but not really, we just want to prevent the spread of disease is all” answers but the actions we’re seeing seem to imply that this is some super-virus that’s gonna wipe out 20% of the population. And maybe that’s the case, but if you want people to treat it that way, we need to hear that.
All I’ve been hearing from foreign and domestic leaders is “this is basically a really nasty flu.” Well guess what, the flu is background noise to everyone. Yeah it kills people but it’s just not perceived as some massive ongoing threat. Meanwhile you’ve got entire countries locking themselves down like it’s 28 Days Later over this particular virus. But again, nothing but “eh nothing to worry about, just like, quarantine yourself for the next couple weeks” talk from our leaders, how is anyone supposed to take this seriously if no one will admit that this virus is “something different this time”?
If the 2% fatality rate is accurate, compared to the flu’s 0.1%. That is 20x worse. The other scary part is that we don’t yet know if this virus is going to be seasonal like the flu.
1) people selfishly reason from their point of view: "there is a 2% chance I'll die". But it is more than 10% for those aged 70+.
2) people don't think systemic and forget second-order effect s. If the health system can't handle everyone being sick at the same time, it's not 2% but much more. Moreover, anyone requiring intensive care will be subject to triage, not just Corona cases.
3) people forget the health impact after healing (diminished lung functions due to fibrosis, etc)
It was avian influenza in the 2000s. What you saw with avian influenza was a direct consequence of how much poultry was being produced to feed people
So meat eating is not only a big driver in climate change and antibiotic resistance but is also dramatically increasing the likelihood of these crossover pandemics. It's time for us to quit our toxic addiction to meat.
In TFA, there's the argument that human invasion of more and more wildlife habitat has increased the risk for zoonosis:
> Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production.
And about meat, there are two issues. One is about impacts of livestock production, and the other is about wildlife consumption.
Not to be too grim, but that may well be changing right now...
For instance, there are certain things you find in large quantities in meat or fish, where the non meat aubsistute would require completely unrealistic amounts to be consumed to receive anywhere near the same amount.
If this could be concretely addressed, I think that'd convince a lot of people on the fence to switch.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27886704
We're killing ourselves and the planet just because we like the way animals taste.
And evolution has given us tastes for things that are highly nutritious but were difficult to come by. Shall we deny ourselves these pleasures because they become problematic at scale? If so, what else should we ban by the same logic?
Perhaps the main problem is that there are too many of us. Or maybe we should be putting more effort into growing meat in vats.
Whatever we end up doing, I doubt it'll end in some kind of sustainable balance. Rather, we'll continue to multiply and consume as much as our technology allows and the environment can bare.
What gives meat the taste are the spices and the way we prepare it.
We now have great plant based alternatives (Impossible Food, Beyond Meat, and more coming on the market) that are getting better and better and which are less harmful to our biosphere. But even without those alternatives, there are so many great dishes that don't require meat and they are delicious and nutritious. Just have to have an open mind and explore what's out there.
RE: Shall we deny ourselves these pleasures because they become problematic at scale?
There are so many studies (some of which I posted further above). Science confirms that our current way of life is not sustainable.
So what is more important?
A) That we don't put our ecosystem under immense pressure as we are doing now
B) The pleasure you derive from eating chopped up animals
EDIT: formatting / typos
Yes.
Anything that has an environmental externality. Not necessarily ban, but definitely reduce the use, possibly by making it more expensive, or just stop subsidizing it.
You do need to take care in having good diet, like taking care of protein intake, B12, omega-3. I personally prefer a flexitarian diet, where meat is rare, mostly vegetarian and vegan when I want to. Thing is, you don’t need meat every day, and just halving it makes a great difference already with minimum effect on your health.
> So meat eating is not only a big driver in climate change and antibiotic resistance but is also dramatically increasing the likelihood of these crossover pandemics.
The human population grew from 250 million in the 1800s to 7 billion today thanks to meat consumption, oil, etc. Blaming meat, oil, etc isn't going to get you very far because facts and reality are hurdles that you just can't overcome.
> It's time for us to quit our toxic addiction to meat.
The only truly toxic thing is vegetation because plants release toxins to prevent being eaten.
https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-can-hear-themselves-bein...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_defense_against_herbivor...
Not to mention the amounts of pesticides and chemicals that you have to use on vegetation for human consumption.
From what I read giving up our meat heavy diet is going to be necessary to reduce GHG emissions. And not only that - the heavy animal agriculture industry also contributes to biodiversity loss and pollution.
This researcher[1] from the Oxford University conducted a 5 year study to understand the impact our current food choices have on the environment. He gave up meat & dairy as the conclusion of the study was that adopting a more plant based diet is the single best thing an individual can do to reduce their own carbon footprint.
The UN released a similar report and recommended the same - to heavily reduce or give up meat completely.
And then there is the water usage required for animal agriculture [2].
Sources:
[0] https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/201603-plant-based-di...
[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987.full?ijk...
[2] https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
EDIT: formatting
The level of delusion and misinformation on this issue is tragic and mindboggling but go ahead and enjoy your selfish tech bro lifestyle.
Where did I say this? I'm used to straw man arguments from vegans but not this blatant.
> The level of delusion and misinformation on this issue is tragic and mindboggling
You are just using talking points that you just use when you are confronted with reality.
> but go ahead and enjoy your selfish tech bro lifestyle.
The most selfish, privileged people I've come across are vegans. A vegan diet is a wealthy privileged diet and an unnatural one at that. A diet that relies on globalism and can't be sourced locally. People can eat an omnivore diet from local sources. Nobody on earth can eat a vegan diet from local sources. Not a privileged swedish vegan, not a privileged brazilian vegan or a innuit vegan if there is such a thing.
The worst diet for the environment is the vegan diet. Think about it or go learn a thing or two about agriculture. Instead of delusional vegan propaganda. The worst diet for humans is a vegan diet. Ever notice why there has been no vegan society in human history? Because humans aren't herbivores. We aren't cows.
But privileged and selfish vegans can exploit globalism to get vegetation from all over the world to feed their selfish privileged existence and of course pop them pills to poorly sustain yourself as you cling on to your faux moral high ground.
One cow feeds a bunch of people. One vegan dish has thousands of dead animal parts in it. You might want to read about how many insect, rodent, etc parts is in your salad. You might want to read about how many poor farmers are killed to get you that avocado and how many animals are killed to sustain your selfish privileged diet.
A person eating a steak knows one animal died for his meal. A vegan eating a salad knows thousands of animals died for his meal but instead pretend to be the moral superior.
For example:
RE: The worst diet for humans is a vegan diet.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine[0] recommends a more plant-based diet, the opposite of what you claim.
It's called reality and human evolution. Do me a favor and find me a single vegan society that has existed anywhere on earth? You won't because a vegan diet in nature is a suicide diet.
> The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine[0] recommends a more plant-based diet, the opposite of what you claim
How is that the opposite? A more plant-based diet isn't a vegan diet. Otherwise, it would say an "all plant-based diet". Typical sneaky vegan m.o. I'm for eating veggies, fruits, etc. I'm also for eating meat. Because humans are omnivores and that's the best diet for humans. No amount of vegan paid propaganda sources is going to change that reality.
This argument makes no sense at all. We should start listening more to science and less to random comments in a forum.
Reduction of meat production is needed to reduce global warming. Miss-information and under investment in clean energy, health care, education, and other basic necessities put all us at risk.
The argument that meat is somehow a better use of land is incorrect however. Most calories are currently grown to feed animals. Typically in mono crops. These are usually drenched in petrochemicals.
Vegan food is currently more of an “edge” product of a food system geared towards animal agriculture. So no, it’s not very sustainable either. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Regenerative farming practices and agroforestry can produce sufficient vegetable crops, including perennial staple crops, to feed the world. It just requires an attitude change.
People get angry when you talk about reducing meat consumption. I get it — I went through a difficult few weeks when I stopped 5 years ago. It was like giving up cigarettes, alcohol, or sugar.
But during WWII when all the good meat was going to the front lines, the government ran a massive campaign to get people to eat liver. People didn’t like liver. But they successfully changed people’s habits. If we were able to do that, I believe we can convince people to eat less meat.
Sources: “The Carbon Farming Solution”, “The Power of Habit.”
Actually it's a fact.
> Most calories are currently grown to feed animals. Typically in mono crops.
Yes calories that we can't otherwise access is fed to animals who can use it and in turn we eat the animals. Magic. Also, those "mono crops" are grown on poor quality land and in harsh environments where we can't grow avocados, oranges, almonds, etc. You get the idea? If we went vegan, we'd have to level many times more land with richer and warmer climates to grow enough to barely, inefficiently and poorly feed the population.
> These are usually drenched in petrochemicals.
Petrochemicals are fertilizer, so yes, they are "drenched in it" like all farmed products. Of course if we turned to veganism, we'd had to use many times more petrochemicals, pesticides, etc. Really great for the environment. /s
> I get it — I went through a difficult few weeks when I stopped 5 years ago.
Me too. Sounds about right, around the time of the social media propaganda led vegan craze. I got caught up in that nonsense too and even went around with others downvote brigading and spewing lies and misinformation and all sorts of vegan propaganda online. Hopefully you wake up before you do lasting damage to your health.
> It was like giving up cigarettes, alcohol, or sugar.
You mean it was like taking up smoking, drinking, etc. Your health, energy, mental ability, etc all decline.
> But during WWII when all the good meat was going to the front lines, the government ran a massive campaign to get people to eat liver.
Great. Liver is a great nutritious piece of meat and everyone should eat it. I don't know why we primarily go for muscle meats and disregard liver. A bit of butter and onions with liver can be as tasty as a ribeye steak.
> But they successfully changed people’s habits.
Considering how cheap liver is, no they didn't.
> If we were able to do that, I believe we can convince people to eat less meat.
Actually we should convince people to eat more meat ( or more kinds of meat ). It's sad that we mostly go for steak/roast and ignore offal, tail, tongue, etc.
> Sources: “The Carbon Farming Solution”, “The Power of Habit.”
Seems familiar. Sounds about right. I hope one day you wake and realize how silly it all is and how you wasted so much of your life on nonsense.
If you care about the environment and people's health, then veganism is your enemy. If you want globalism, virtue signaling and feeling superior then veganism is the right cult for you. Veganism is like a virus. Once you've been infected, you either die or develop an immunity to it. That's why I encourage more people to try veganism and learn about farming and your food. Most sane people will come to abhor veganism like the cultish virus it is. The remaining few will either die from poor diet or cheat like the "healthy vegans" who eat meat on the side.
The virus had existed in bats for millions of years, evolving and stabilizing itself symbiotically with the bat, and it took just the right combination, the right spark, to set off a chain of events that would allow it to eventually hunt down the human race.