Hacker News Reader

I don't think it is a disservice, and it's not just a "few" or "many" who are relatively well off.

The US has one of the highest median incomes in the world, and no one with higher is even a tenth as populous.

It's perfectly fair to call us the richest country. That we don't have institutions to match is a shame all the more because of our richness. We had/have the resources. We foolishly didn't use them.

The USA is something like 6th in median income adjusted for PPP. If you adjust for how many hours worked to get those wages, it would fall a lot more - 20th? Lower? If you adjusted for public services available it would be lower than that.

Not the worst, but definitely not the richest, not for most people. It's an astonishingly poor showing considering how much money is available to the USA overall.

Consumerism is how they define rich here. The idea thst you have access to more good and services (to buy) than your grandparents did is how this is the best country in the world. It’s a none sense argument and this crisis has just totally exposed it. We have a bunch of old career politicians running decrepit institutions chief of whom comes up with worse ideas every week than he did the prior week. This weeks special: use religious symbolism of Easter to inspire the masses to support his idea of resurrecting the economy. The sad irony here is that the people who help elect this clown and his posse are likely the ones that will be impacted most by this crises. In a weird way it’s fitting - as they say you deserve the politicians you get. And in this case you is the subset of all voters whose votes mattered (swing states) and their electoral vote resulted the people we have today.

> In a weird way it’s fitting - as they say you deserve the politicians you get.

Or, you get the politicians you were served by one of the two major parties. Almost all of whom are bought by special interests.

They could change it to "richest countries", because the US isn't the only rich country that screwed up. Look at Austria and Switzerland and their reliance on importing masks from other countries. Or at the Netherlands, which can actually produce large quantities of masks for domestic use but didn't because the government was too busy downplaying the epidemic.

Yeah. I feel like the U.S. is always in the spotlight for criticism, but there are an awful lot of mistakes to go around. People just don't handle crises well.

Those countries have implemented emergency legislation that makes up for employee pay and institutes a bunch of emergency measures that will make the countries come out the crisis rapidly and more robustly.

I think the odds are about 2 to 3 that the wealthy and connected in the US use the pandemic as an excuse to use free money to wholesale loot everyone else.

I've been thinking along the same lines, that our lack of public preparedness for this is reflected in concentration of returns to capital at the top of the wealth distribution.

But that said, there are things the US stockpiles: corn, petroleum, and weapons.

We over index on preparedness for war. Bill gates has a great ted talk on this who basically called this corona virus situation a few years ago. https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re...

When I look at the whole situation it looks like a bunch of meatheads whose answer to everything is brawn and military superiority.

And like most things in America, the military costs much more than other countries and does much less for its citizens. A good example is what happened when Yemen fell apart: China used its military to evacuate Chinese citizens[1], India used its military to evacuate its citizens[2], and the US told its citizens that they were on their own[3]. The American embassy even told Americans trapped in Yemen that they should seek out the help of India in order to get out of the country[4]. It's hard to escape the notion that for decades America has suffered under a political class that's been a mix of incompetent, self-serving, and uncaring.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32173811 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Raahat [3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/21/washington-to-americans... [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/08...

I've read that same thing about the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Other countries worked hard to help their citizens and get them out. The US just abandoned theirs.

The dust hasn't settled on this yet, but it appears that countries that are in a siege military footing (S. Korea, Israel, Cuba, Taiwan) have done better in controlling this situation because they have strong universal health systems and institutions coupled with mentality of constant preparation for a military siege. The culture of real preparedness is present throughout those countries' institutions, military or not.

This was discussed by Max Brooks on Fresh Air yesterday:

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-c...

What Brooks doesn't discuss is the extent to which those countries have varying degrees of authoritarianism or the tendency for citizens to voluntarily comply with public orders.

In the US however, our military stockpiling is geared toward propping up defense industries. This has value to a point, but only when its objectives are actually defense preparedness, but not when the objectives are profit maximization.

The military is no substitute for having properly resourced and coordinated national institutions to deal with huge public health issues.

The difference with those four countries is that they expect fighting a war on their own soil to be a future possibility. When's the last time Americans actually saw what war on their doorstep looks like? The civil war? America's real defense is the Pacific and Atlantic. The US military is a raiding force that's free to attack anywhere in the world without fear of retaliation because they know the American continent is geographically unassailable.

> they know the American continent is geographically unassailable.

And COVID19 is turning that assumption on its head. The only question that remains is whether the US can buttress what's left of its public health institutions to keep it at bay, and prepare for the next wave that comes, whether of this pandemic or the next one.

I don't remember a H1N1, SARS, or MERS outbreak in the US.

Borders are absolutely a defense, they're just not an absolute defense.

That SARS-CoV-2 was able to spread globally as a pandemic has more to do with its transmissibility and latency characteristics.

> That SARS-CoV-2 was able to spread globally as a pandemic has more to do with its transmissibility and latency characteristics.

Which is what proves that the US isn't unassailable from a pandemic. It would be a mistake to assume that SARS-CoV-2 or something with similar ability to breach geographical barriers won't occur again. Also, nature doesn't care about political entities, and a pandemic could also start in the US.

It isn't, but it would generally be a waste of resources to overprepare for something that has a low probability of happening. In the same way it would be to fortify both coasts.

Budgeting is a zero sum game.

Stockpiles of essential PPE, sure. Pervasive monitoring for early detection? Not worth it.

they know the American continent is geographically unassailable.

That's 'magical thinking'.

No doubt the Japanese thought pretty much the same in 1942. That's why the Dolittle Bombing Raid on Tokyo was such a shock to their systems.

The Doolittle Raid was military insignificant, and in no way should have altered Japan's belief that their home islands were geographically unassailable.

Even in 1945, with the Imperial Japanese Navy suppressed or destroyed and their supply chain in tatters, an invasion would have been incredibly costly.

Occupying enemy territory, across an ocean, with a large population of civilians disinclined to cooperate, is never easy.

> When I look at the whole situation it looks like a bunch of meatheads whose answer to everything is brawn and military superiority.

I'm not overly familiar with how the US medical system works at a detail level, but is it illegal for individual hospitals, clinics, dental offices, etc to independently stockpile critical supplies?

No, but hospitals are mostly for profit in the US so they don't. They run lean so as to make the best return on investment. That's also why we have as few hospital beds as we do. Most US hospitals used to be non-profit. When they were converted to for profit institutions there was a concerted decades long effort to reduce hospital stays and the beds that requires. Completely understandable given the need to make as much money as possible.

This points to an obvious bit of legislation that we need in the US: require hospitals to keep minimum stockpiles of pandemic response supplies, just like banks have minimum financial reserve requirements.

Given that there's an accute shortage of hospitals serving rural areas, regulation of that nature better be accompanied by federal funding for that work.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some serious DHS money redirected to hospitals, after this is all over. They could certainly put it to better use than police departments.

Alternatively, you could assign maintaining the mask inventory to admin staff. I know they often don't have advanced degrees, but I can't imagine they'd do a worse job of it. Actually, they'd probably take the job a lot more seriously than the "experts" who are in charge currently.

Assigning such tasks to a central body seems like an extremely fragile design, and as evidence for this assertion, I offer the current state of reality. I find it a rather convincing argument, but then I'm probably quite biased.

Yes, this seems like the obvious explanation to me as well.

My question was regarding the other poster's proposed explanation: "When I look at the whole situation it looks like a bunch of meatheads whose answer to everything is brawn and military superiority."

Simple profit maximization seems like a much better fit to me.

I suspect if we were to sit down and do an actually proper post-mortem on this debacle, it would mostly reveal a giant pile of simple explanations like this. I doubt this situation is nearly as complicated or conspiratorial as most people are making it out to be. Rather, it is simply optimizing for a particular variable, and if people aren't smart enough to realize that other variables are going to suffer correspondingly, and this low quality of thinking becomes prevalent enough that it becomes a literal existential threat, then I think it's about time the citizens of planet Earth put down their weapons for 2 or 3 months, and had a serious conversation.

I believe that if people continue to communicate in literal untruths, often knowingly, it will not be long until our demise as a species. Covid-19 feels to me like a warning from a different dimension. Whether this is literally true, if conceptualizing it in this way helps people to actually fucking think for a change, I say let's roll with it, or whatever other weird psychological sleights of hand get the job done. And I suggest we do it fast, because if we continue on this same downward trajectory (with increasing speed), it may not even take an anomalous event like this for us to wipe ourselves out.

I think we need some new ideas. I feel like we have to form a new internet community of some kind, not unlike what we have now (reddit, the software itself with a few minor feature additions & subtractions, would be more than sufficient). The main change, the change that I believe would make the difference, would be extremely strict new guidelines around acceptable behavior, that are enforced with extreme prejudice.

I actually believe there is one single rule that could fix the overwhelming majority of these problems, and here it is:

> RULE #1: It is completely forbidden to say things that are not true. Ever. Violations of this rule will result in increasingly severe punishments, ultimately resulting in a permanent ban.

Read that sentence, and be careful your mind doesn't start automatically generating ideas that prove it "impossible" (this word, like so many others, no longer has a common shared definition) - if it does, just make it stop and return to reading the sentence. Try to bring a sense of peace into your mind, it is likely not going to like that so it will be a struggle, but hang in there. Try to contemplate what is truly being said here, truly consider if "only say things that are true" is really such a ridiculously high goal, at least for us to aim towards.

Is this not very similar (but more stringent) to what our parents taught us when we were growing up? Is truthfulness too much for us to even try for at this point in humanity's evolution? If I am the only one that sees this as an attainable, righteous, and pragmatically useful goal, then I'm not really sure if I want to be here any more. I feel like I don't have anything in common with anyone. I don't like what Earth is becoming. I feel like an alien here, like I am of a different kind of some sort, like I don't belong here, like I have somehow wound up in the incorrect dimension.

Can no one else see what I'm talking about? Have I completely lost the plot? Someone has to do something. I wish someone would at least try. I wish someone could at least even admit that there's a problem. If we can't even agree that there's a problem, and roughly what the nature of that problem is, or even agree that this is something worth looking into, I feel like we should just wrap this whole thing up, because our days are numbered anyways.

> private institutions have been optimized to extract profits

Where are the private institutions trying to extract profit from selling facemasks. I cannot find one at any price.

The private company outsourced production last year to extract more profit.

They're not allowed to operate. In a more free market, masks would be available but at a higher price. Here's a shop that was required to stop selling masks because its price was too high: https://www.macombdaily.com/news/local/warren-company-accuse...

Agreed. Per capita they are not the richest, whatever their figures say. Much of usd health spending is just numbers on paper, they don't have the resources.