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Comment by uCantCauseUCant | Hacker News Reader

"There is no proof of global pandemic ever have happened in our lifetimes, no need to prepare for them."

If you get bad news, look at the proportionality of cost preparing for the event compared to the cost of the event. A pandemic preparation and proper pre-warn system (as South korea and taiwan had it) would have cost absolutly nothing compared to the pandemic cost.

Same goes for gulf stream collapse. Cost of the for-warning system, cost of agricultural switch of europe to the canadian model, against the cost of not doing so..

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What is worse is that the United States had a warning system. The world depended on it.

The budget for it was 800 million dollars.

It was removed from the budget in 2018 and I believe the funding ran out September 2019.

It only took three months.

By March 2020-the administration was putting out $800 BILLION dollars.

And since then they’ve put out more.

Taiwan—which adopted the US system (and therefore was in Wuhan January 4) had no real outbreak until 2 month ago—and even then, the outbreak was contained.

Frustrating…

You tend to get the government that you deserve in a democracy.

I know we call the USA a democracy, but I’m becoming more of a stickler for calling it a Republic. Some of the states are a bit more Democratic than the Federal government.

I wonder whether people would take the decisions more seriously if they had to vote on them as they so in Switzerland.

It probably would but (1) that requires a somewhat educated electorate and (2) it takes a while to get to the point where a system like that operates smoothly. Switzerland has had this system going back to 1848 https://www.bk.admin.ch/ch/d/pore/va/18480606/index.html , and at the time who got to vote was not quite the same as how it is today so the system was gradually expanded.

If you were to switch overnight to referenda in say the United States the result would be mayhem.

> A pandemic preparation and proper pre-warn system (as South korea and taiwan had it) would have cost absolutly nothing compared to the pandemic cost.

Fair enough.

The difficulty arises in context when a menu of risks exist, and resources to mitigate them are insufficient to address all of the risks sufficiently.

Choices occur, and consequences follow.

As a country, we collectively have vastly more resources than we need to mitigate all these risks.

The problem is that a huge proportion of those resources is being hoarded by the super-rich.

As a society, we have collectively decided that allowing massive, unprecedented concentration of wealth is more important than addressing any of the critical issues facing us today.

Personally, I disagree with that decision, and believe we should require those who can part with billions of dollars without it affecting their lifestyle in any way to do so for the benefit of all.

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