Hacker News Reader

Comment by givemeethekeys | Hacker News Reader

Fear leads to a loss of freedom.

When we're afraid, we give power to politicians that promise deal with it swiftly. Pre-pandemic, the right had a monopoly on fear-based politicking. Then the pandemic hit and the left finally got their turn to exercise it.

Has the war on terror stopped? No? When do we get to hop onto a plane without undressing ourselves?

Oh, but now there's a war against viruses? So you have to undress yourself and take a shot.

Next, there will be a war on climate change. You'll have to undress yourself, take a shot, and prove that you only took public transit to the airport, and that you haven't eaten beef for 48 hours prior because it leads to more gas from farts, which is bad for the environment.

When the next financial crisis hits (and it hasn't yet), and a large number of middle class people get wiped out again, there will be legislation to protect retail investors from the volatility of the stork market. You must go to a certified and licensed financial professional for your wealth planning.

The appropriate politician from the left or right will run for office and get voted in because when most people fear something, they vote against freedom.

/rant

View on HN

The difference is that terrorism in the US is a miniscule threat in reality, killing a handful of people a year, whereas the virus is one of the top causes of death over the past two years. Not all fears are unjustified. Climate change already kills far more people annually than terrorism via floods, fires, and droughts. That being said, fear doesn't justify authoritarianism, even when the fear is reasonable.

The individual chance that you die from any of that does NOT warrant fear.

Similarly, the individual chance of getting cancer by smoking a cigarette doesn't warrant fear. But if you apply this logic to cigarette after cigarette, you may end up in a PSA talking through a hole in your throat and telling everyone not to smoke. Fortunately, as human beings, we can see patterns in large numbers and act on them. We aren't limited to looking at the world through the keyhole of individual risk. We can take a broader view.

I think your system is not an accurate representation. They are talking about an individuals risk of these events killing them. Your system is talking about the cumulative risk of individual cigarettes. This distinction needs to be made because the risk varies greatly by location and ones preparation (mitigating factors).

My 'system' is talking about incremental risks, whether they are across time or across individuals. The point is that these incremental risks are not great in themselves, but when accumulated, they become substantial. If climate change contributes to increasing disease, as is projected, the cumulation of diseases over time become a substantial risk even to the individual, even if they aren't directly affected by flood, fire or drought. And of course even a low direct individual risk can cascade into a societal risk that circles back to affect the individual. Take the chief risk of COVID-19, which is that the local medical system is overwhelmed. When this becomes acute, as it did in Italy, it affects even those who were at little risk of COVID itself, by denying them access to health care in the event of an accident or other illness.

Which is still an extremely low risk, affecting a relatively small part of the population. The infectious diseases they talk about are from expansion of the disease carrier range (mosquitoes and ticks). These have mitigating factors to avoid the infections. There's very little cumulative risk and it's still largely location based.

So this is a far cry from your example of cigarettes and ending up in a PSA. The risk is much higher with cigarettes. As stated by the previous commenter - they are not something to be afraid of.

> Which is still an extremely low risk, affecting a relatively small part of the population.

You're looking at it through the individual lens again. The chances of an individual winning the lottery in any year are near zero, but the chances of there being some lottery winner in any year are near 100%. The chance of any one car trip resulting in an accident are extremely low, yet we still wear a seat belt consistently because the long term chances of an accident are high even if we are careful drivers---we rightly fear the consequences of an accident without a restraint. And the cigarette example, which is only a "far cry" if you grossly underestimate all the cumulative risks associated with climate change.

Simply handwaving away the death toll from insect-borne infection because they don't affect you personally doesn't make them any less real. And of course those aren't the only climate related risks. Drought, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornados and blizzards are all correlated with increasing thermal energy in Earth's atmosphere. Something we should rationally fear and actively work to mitigate.

"You're looking at it through the individual lens again."

The entire point of this thread - that individuals shouldn't fear these things. Fear is at the individual level.

"we rightly fear the consequences of an accident without a restraint."

Why would we be afraid of a moot scenario? If you have and use a seat belt, then this isn't a scenario to fear. Even then, the occurrence of an accident when being careful is low enough that there is not fear when driving down the road. If there was substantial fear, then we wouldn't drive (like people I know who have a panic attack when driving).

"if you grossly underestimate all the cumulative risks associated with climate change."

They have yet to be fully disclosed/known and materialize. It's reasonable to not be afraid of something that does not yet exist.

"Simply handwaving away the death toll from insect-borne infection because they don't affect you personally doesn't make them any less real."

It's not hand waving. There are mitigating steps to be taken. It's certainly nothing to be afraid of for many people. Again, the component of the comment we are discussing.

"Drought, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornados and blizzards are all correlated with increasing thermal energy in Earth's atmosphere. Something we should rationally fear and actively work to mitigate."

It's not rational to fear something that doesn't affect you. These things do not affect all areas. You can work to mitigate things without being afraid of them. I'm not afraid of those events as they largely don't affect my area, and I take steps to mitigate any damage from the ones rest do occur.

I think the basic problem here is that you attach strong negative connotations to the word "fear". But fear is useful to us, as in the seatbelt example:

> Why would we be afraid of a moot scenario? If you have and use a seat belt, then this isn't a scenario to fear.

My point was that we wear the seat belt because we fear having an accident without it. Just as we take mitigating actions against disease because we fear facing the disease without them.

> It's not rational to fear something that doesn't affect you.

Sure, if it truly does not and could not affect you. But global warming can affect every person on the planet. There is virtually nowhere that is immune to all of the direct and indirect effects. And even if there were such a place, human beings are interconnected economically and socially, so that if something negatively impacts people in one place, it can indirectly and negatively affect people elsewhere.

> You can work to mitigate things without being afraid of them.

Why would you work to mitigate something that was completely benign? You do it because you fear the possible consequences of not mitigating, the same reason you wear a seat belt. It is exactly this entirely rational fear that public officials use to justify mitigating global warming, the well-founded fear that if we don't, it will potentially cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

Fear is an emotional motivation, and can be a cause for taking on the seatbelt. There are also logical motivations, such as the realization that I will be less injured if I have a seatbelt and an accident happens.

It’s not that the action of using a seatbelt is different, but my reason for doing that can be very different. This can also apply to Covid and other risk mitigation. And emotional motivations usually affects us humans more strongly than logical ones, so using them is good when you want to motivate more drastic actions. So most overreaches are motivated by emotional arguments, such as fear. Because of that it’s good to be skeptical about such arguments.

People don't wear seat belts because they've thought to themselves, "I could be injured and therefore less capable if I don't wear a seat belt." They wear a seat belt because they (very rationally) fear death or serious injury. It's interesting that some folks have such a stigma about admitting fear, though. It's like the people who insist that advertising has no effect on them, just all those other weaklings.

Absolutely right. However, it doesn't stop politicial groups or media from using ominous music and dystopian or wasteland images to evoke fear in their audience.

Actually fewer die due to climate change due to fewer people freezing to death...

> Overall, a total of more than 19,000 Americans have died from cold-related causes since 1979, according to death certificates.

It's a bit hard to prove who died due to the flood/etc being affect by climate change as opposed to if they'd have died if the flood was less. But I'm not sure ~500/yr is a good number to bet against.

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica....

That’s a gross oversimplification of climate change. You have people dying because crops can’t survive.. people dying because they got misplaced on coastal areas .. people dying because of extreme heat.. people dying on fires … And that without counting that freeze to death due to extreme cold.. which climate change also causes

I think fear can do a lot of things, as you say, the loss of freedom. I also think the lack of fear can lead to the loss of freedom. Fear can help us temper our actions so we don't do things that end up hurting us severely or even killing us.

That being said, I would agree that repressed fear can do us quite a bit of harm and I think it often happens because we'll say fear is bad, without just appreciating how it hurts and helps.

Only if the lack of fear is because an authority figure has managed it all for you. This creates the bigger problem of a lack of self-regulation and automatic trust in authority.

I guess I meant lack of fear in a very basic way. Not being afraid to jump off a cliff can be pretty detrimental to one's freedom.

This illustrates perfectly the false axis of the idea of right vs left outside of economic spheres (and labor vs capital is more accurate than left vs right in the economic realm).

The spectrum of totalitarianism vs anarchy is a much better axis to use with regards to this topic, IMO. In that light, it is easy to see that all of the post-9/11 fear-mongering and the COVID fear-mongering are run with the same agenda: more restrictions, less freedom.

Wait how can I get some exposure to the stork market. I need to hedge my baby bets.

Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful.

Back in the 60s-80s, the world managed to use the fear of pox to eradicate the disease from existence - and most did so by instituting a vaccine mandate.

Back in the late 70s/80s, the world managed to use the fear of acid rain to ban sulphur emissions (LRTAP convention). In the early 90s, the world managed to use the fear of ozone to ban CFC gas usage.

Back in the Cold War, both major superpowers were too afraid of the other one to launch nuclear weapons to initiate direct warfare, and in the end the fear of global warfare led to comprehensive international agreements on reducing arms proliferation.

The difference is: back then, politicians did the right thing to do based on scientific evidence and indications of issues. These days?! Scientists and activists have warned for decades about the dangers of climate change and the urgency to do something... but until now, all we got is politicians waffling around instead of actually doing anything to combat the real problems we are going to face.

> Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful.

this is critically underrated. dismissing ths current feardriven environment really misses the issue.

what is new now is not fear, but the communication - the market penetration. sowing dissent used to be the game of spies. now any political enemy, foreign and domestic, just has to tweet or facebook.

perhaps trust SHOULD be at an all time low.

I agree with most of what you say. However, one thing I must point out is that climate change is a complex problem with no easy solutions.

As much as it sounds like we should "just turn off the oil" that would in fact lead to millions of deaths.

It's possible that there are problems that are unsolvable or at least a best outcome doesn't exist. Extinction maybe inevitable.

> However, one thing I must point out is that climate change is a complex problem with no easy solutions.

Indeed, but right now we are doing almost nothing meaningful. We shame people from taking vacation flights once every couple years but don't ban short distance "business flights" for corporate executives with a completely bonkers view on how important they are. We still don't mandate the end of "bunker fuel" burning on ships or the usage of land-line power of cruise ships. Instead of building electrified freight and passenger rail, large parts of the rail network run on decades old diesel engines, large parts of freight runs on trucks and in the US the word "high speed passenger rail" is as inconceivable as "fair minimum wage".

One again I agree with most of what you're suggesting here. One more point of nuance though.

What is the carbon foot print of replacing all the rail and freight? Do we have the funds to make these changes all at once? How quickly can we realistically change out our entire fossil fuel infrastructure?

The first motor car was in 1886, over 130 years ago.

The first mass produced motor car was 1908, Over 110 years ago.

We've built this current system for over 100 years. Rebuilding a new one may also take a similar time line. The tragedy is we may not be able to BUT... you are right.

We should try!

> What is the carbon foot print of replacing all the rail and freight?

You don't need to replace the rails, only add overhead power. Which, granted, isn't free in terms of CO2, but saves a lot of fossil fuel emissions and particulate matter emissions for those living adjacent to rail routes (which is mostly poor people, so this issue also has a social impact) down the roat.

> Do we have the funds to make these changes all at once?

The US spends more on their military than the next 7-11 (depending on which source you want to cite) countries combined. The US spends twice as much per person for healthcare than European countries, with worse results.

There are way more than enough ways to fund a transportation revolution, and in the worst case the US Government can issue special ear-marked bonds.

> How quickly can we realistically change out our entire fossil fuel infrastructure?

Two to three decades. Which coincidentally lines up with the predictions on when climate change will hit the "irreversibility" point.

Without fear, however, you don't get any kind of progress. Fear is powerful

Disagree. Fear is not the only motivator, and it's a particularly bad one, because it spurs immediate action rather than exploration. Fear of sailing into the unknown is also what kept Europeans in the dark about the American continent for centuries.

What "fear" motivated the construction of the LHC at CERN? Wasn't it fear that caused a lot of people to advocate loudly against turning it on and performing experiments with it?

Overcoming fear drives progress (but it is by no means the only driver). Giving in to fear just leads to regression.

> Disagree. Fear is not the only motivator, and it's a particularly bad one, because it spurs immediate action rather than exploration.

For many problems, the longer you let them sit around the worse they become. Linearly accelerating problems, yeah, you can usually get by with sitting them out.

But exponentially accelerating problems (climate change, infectious agents, consumer debt) require immediate and harsh response, otherwise they become so much more difficult to resolve. The key issue is that most people lack the basic education to understand exponential functions, even after two years of a pandemic.

> What "fear" motivated the construction of the LHC at CERN?

None.

> Wasn't it fear that caused a lot of people to advocate loudly against turning it on and performing experiments?

Indeed, but that one was a "false equivalency" media issue. Crackpots got a lot of media presence despite their claims being outright invalid from the start or being absolute niche opinions, simply because their unfounded fear brought in a lot of clicks from an ignorant and uneducated public.

Coincidentally or not, we have seen the same media issues in the COVID crisis, particularly with Fox "News"/OAN/"News"max in the US or the Axel Springer/Murdoch tabloids in Europe.

Fear and logic can look the same from the outside when logic dictates caution. Do you "fear" fire? You understand it, and know what you can and cannot do with it. Yet your aversion to ever letting it exist outside of very tight controlled scenarios, and perhaps panic if you saw it spreading uncontrollably quickly, would look an awful lot like fear to somebody who didn't understand what fire was.

I think the main difference is that fear is an emotional response. And this important because emotions can often misguide us are also easily exploited. For instance, racism is often a product of fear. People see some group of people engaging in crime at a higher rate than usual, and start to fear all people of this group as criminals even when that fear and prejudice is completely unjustified. And tyrants since time immemorial have used "fear the other group" as a rallying cry for self righteous horrible acts in the name of a better tomorrow that never comes.

So in your examples is it primarily fear driving behaviors, or primarily logic/rationality?

A rant like this makes me ask; can we do much better? Want if this is about as good as human cooperation gets?

A rant like this has only one answer, and it’s for society to stop trying. The ranter fails to grapple with details, matters of fact, and reality in general. The ranter is overwhelmed.

While the right certainly had their fear based issues before the pandemic, it’s a bit of a stretch to say the left didn’t.

Trump was going to become a dictator. We had 12 years to go living on earth 4 years ago. Apparently almost everyone is a white supremacist… I could go on. Why didn’t Obama revoke the patriot act if he was so on the side of non fear? Or allow more whistleblowing.

European perspective here: Trump was definitely trying to make himself a dictator, just look at how he handled losing an election. Please don’t vote him in again America.

Agree on moral panic issues though.

He was handed a global pandemic in which it was completely permissible for leaders to take on unprecedented, unlimited emergency powers, and yet he did nothing. He was actually criticized for not using his emergency powers to implement an (unconstitutional) national lockdown. If his true goal was to become a dictator, why did he do nothing when he was given the perfect opportunity?

His European perspective means that it is skewed much much more "liberal" than when in the US.

About half the population here thinks he is a literal monster, worthy of a Godwin.

He made no difference between himself and the state. Used the AG as his personal lawyer. Used his position to secure personal business dealings. And then tried to orchestrate a coup when he lost.

He’s not literally the devil but he’s both so incompetent and corrupt that I’m frankly baffled there is such fervent support for him.

If you read American leftist media from late 2020 to January 2021 you'll find a bunch of breathless editorials claiming that Trump was about to declare martial law and assume dictatorial powers. That was obviously nonsense and displayed a complete lack of knowledge about how the US federal government and military work.

It's lack of trust more than a lack of knowledge. See: the submission title.

I can see how this perspective seems reasonable if you've never been on the boot-end of unjust laws, but a lot of us over here on the left side of the center have good reason to doubt that the good parts of law and order can hold up against a sufficiently inspiring and intelligent dictator. Trump was a fool and squandered what he had. Someone will run with what he built and fumbled in the same way Obama ran with what Howard Dean built and fumbled.

This is actually why I'm wary of calls to abolish the Senate and Supreme Court. They suck when you want to get stuff done, but they also give us time to organize against people who want to install a dictatorship. Our tar pit of a system and people at high levels believing in it was the only thing that stood between Trump and the genocide he'd love to give large parts of his base.

Heck, 20 years ago we had 10 years until climate change killed us all.

Media hyperbole aside especially when it comes to US conservative coverage... we still didn't get anywhere close to the measures climate scientists wish we took and we're still chugging onwards with a very slow increase in average temperatures which are in line if not above what was predicted

If the left really got power we would all get a month paid vacation so we could actually afford to stock up and stay home while the virus dies off. The left is not in any way empowered in this country.

"stock up and stay home while the virus dies off"

Given the existence of animal reservoirs, short-lived immunity, asymptomatic carriers, continued transmission after vaccination, and the genetic instability of SARS-CoV-2, this seems like an incredibly naive view.

The only virus we've been able to eradicate — smallpox — was a VERY different beast because it had none of the issues listed above.

We've spent trillions on all kinds of naive nonsense. What's the worst that could happen, people get a month off and the line goes up thanks to all the stimulus? Oh, the horror.

Mindless cynicism is not the virtuous alternative to optimism. We can do nothing and watch as our health care system continues to collapse or do something. Maybe this isn't it, but you haven't offered a better idea.

It's easy to tear people down for standing up to make a suggestion.

Not all ideas are worth pursuing. Continuing as-is most of the time (like 99.99%) is the appropriate choice. Do you move every time a stranger on TV/street suggests that?

Continuing as-is will mean the nearly full ICU beds will fill up and the already overwhelmed and too-short supply of medical professionals will dry up as they seek other careers. Every doctor I know who hasn't quit is in or approaching a burnout.

The curve of deaths from omicron in the US is already above delta's peak in much less time. Do you imagine this will just pass by without completely overwhelming the health care system? It's too late to do anything for this strain, but I don't want to gamble on it being the last or worst.

Hi there - it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle for a long time now. I had to go back 2 years to find anything else! That's not a legit use of HN, regardless of what your positions are, because it's not in keeping with the intellectual curiosity this site is supposed to be for. In fact, it's destructive of it. For that reason, we ban accounts that are using the site this way. I don't want to ban you, so could you please fix this?

Further explanations are at these links if anyone wants more:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

By "all" do you also mean healthcare workers? Law enforcement? Farmers? Military? Utility workers? Garbage collectors? Homeless people?

Even if you somehow locked all the humans in their homes for a month, someone would catch the virus again from a deer or something and the pandemic would start all over again.

The actual point seems to stand. Left, right, center. All have ill-advised proposals. Some are more willing than others to put their ideas on the table and take feedback (not blanket dismissals).

There hasn't been anyone remotely leftist in power for most of a century, so it's plainly inaccurate for /u/givemeethekeys to say:

>> "Then the pandemic hit and the left finally got their turn to exercise it."

Biden is, at best, a status quo maintainer in a deeply right-ratcheted[0] status quo.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect

"There hasn't been anyone remotely leftist in power for most of a century"

I think that highly depends on one's definition of "leftist".

This is the unfortunate side-effect when social and political signifiers become snarl words. I haven't done a science on it, but it seems like most people who use "left" sans detail and don't consider themselves leftist bundle DNC, DSA, and all the other center-left factions into one and imagine them being led by whoever the current DNC leader or president is.

I double checked /u/givemeethekeys' post and it's hard to pin down a definition. They mostly seem to want to accuse Biden of being a Republican while also insinuating he's a leftist, so their whole analysis is deeply confused (or confusing as presented).

"Pre-pandemic, the right had a monopoly on fear-based politicking."

Not exactly. I think this is an example of how different perspectives lead to fear being used to drive a law, because it has been used by both sides. Those who agree with the law believe the threat (fear) is enough to justify the law, and forget that it was fear that drove it in the first place, or downplay the fear element.

I realise this was a /rant, but it's still spectacularly misinformed and unhelpful.

If your hot take on politics is that climate change, COVID and the war on terror are all the same thing and this proves the left and right are both the same, then you're part of the problem.

This reads more like a smart person trying to rationalize their cognitive dissonance, when they know deep down they've found themselves on obviously the morally and factually wrong side of an argument and see no way to retreat while maintaining face.

"If your hot take on politics is that climate change, COVID and the war on terror are all the same thing "

I did not read it like this, but rather that all those topics are used by politicians in the same way. To generate fear, to control people. Neverending crisis. Neverending war. Rigid, emergency exemption laws for all eternity. Very well described by Orwell in 1984 already.

Neither the left or the right is arguing that climate change or COVID does not exist. The loud disagreements is about what strategy to deploy. We have nations like Germany that want to use natural gas to combat climate change, and we got France that want to use nuclear. The left leans towards natural gas, the right towards nuclear, both arguing that their strategy will lead towards an end to climate change and that the other side won't. Should vegetarian diet be part of our cultural diet, insects meal, blue agriculture, or should we focus our climate change priority on energy, transportation, heating, industry, futuristic technology and so on.

With COVID we have had more strategy than can be reasonable described in a comment, some which the left favor and others that the right favors. Should we classify the Swedish strategy as "right" and the Danish strategy as "left"? Doctors all over the world disagree on what optimal treatment is and in the end it is the patient outcome that dictate who was right.

The issue is that politicians get voted in because people fear the bad outcome, not because people favor one strategy above an other strategy. Thus the perception from both sides is that the "other" side do not believe that the bad outcome exist.

“ Neither the left or the right is arguing that climate change or COVID does not exist”

What!?

This is a man elected to the US Senate in 1994. First elected to Cross in 1987. Still there today. Guess which political party he belongs to. https://youtu.be/3E0a_60PMR8

Folks are literally about to be put on respirators denying they're sick from Covid. They're rarely if ever left wing. https://youtu.be/WicsWfTm1ZI

So yeah, one side has the lion's share of denying climate change and Covid.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to research which demographic has been promoting the consumption of urine as a protective measure against a respiratory and vascular disease-causing virus.

It may be popular to blame politicians, but people need to take responsibility for voting for folks that espouse belief in Jewish space lasers. Whether you think the politician is putting up a front or honestly believes what they're peddling really doesn't matter in the long run if you're filling in the box next to their name on the ballot.

In a global context, the number of people believing in Jewish space lasers is a poor excuse to implement global surveillance and censorship. I rather that each country where those people live in take care of their citizens with the health care that they need, or legal system if those people get violent. I suspect however that fear over people that believe in Jewish space lasers is out of proportion of the actually number and threat of such people.

Do you have any numbers of how large the demographic of Jewish space lasers believers are and the number of incident globally where they caused harm to society?

We're not talking about a global context. We're specifically talking about US politics.

Just one believer in Jewish space lasers elected to Congress is far too many, and we have notably more than one. All from the same US party. And then there's the state level, all from the same US party.

Random folks believing in crazy notions is worrisome but viewable as a marginal percentage of the population, but we're not talking about them.

We're talking about elected individuals with real power who vote on real laws that affect us all. Some of those Congresspeople believe in Jewish space lasers, and all of those delusional folks belong to the GOP.

We can discuss whether it is sanguine to have Congresspeople make stock trades with a clear conflict of interest/insider trading. We can argue about what the top marginal tax rate should be. We can debate the merits of expanding or contracting the social safety net as it regards health care or parental leave or pre-K education/day care.

We're talking about elected officials—and an associated constituency that either support them or don't consider it a deal-breaker—who believe in Jewish space lasers and Democratic pizza parlor child sex and mutilation dungeons.

You can scream "free speech" all you like, but if you cannot see the substantive difference, free speech will not save you.

Yours seems like a particularly uncharitable interpretation compared to my reading; I didn't hear them saying D == R so much as both are susceptible to the same flaw of human nature: impulsive overreaction to stimuli we find threatening.

I do agree that's an unhelpful analysis, but only because it happens to be tautological.

I think your comment got an unfair downvote. The rant was okay, but it went on to talk about a strawman argument of a measure(beef consumption) before flying. However, the better I'd have put the whole rant(not sure OP agrees, this is just my reading of it), is like this: We've been reactively forming policies out of fear of extreme bad/negative consequence events. Since, the time window of public/societal memory is limited and there's a cycle of elections and power structure climbing too involved, the policies tend to be ones that are sellable/explain-away-able to the vast majority of the public. And these become the standards till another event occurs and never re-considered.

And supplementing this rant: a very frustrating aspect of all this is these things are predictable at a high level.

* It is certain that in a given lifetime there will be some hostile act that causes hundreds to thousands of deaths.

* When you look at how quickly people can travel the world, it was pretty clear there were going to be some pretty horrific diseases this century. We're thankful that it wasn't Ebola.

* The climate has been a matter of crisis since biblical times.

* Financial markets are obviously healthy, deindustrialisation of advanced economies is a sign of sustainable progress, printing money then handing it out to asset owners has becoming the normal response because it has proven to work very well and isn't causing any social pressures at all (people voted for Trump only due to racism). So maybe the next financial crisis is unpredictable. Things seem pretty rosy in this department. No need to prepare.

Why humans are programmed to wait until midway through a crisis to start identifying the risks is a puzzler. The problems are very obvious unless people listen to mass media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com