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>Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.

That's probably because it was not that great impact wise. If it was more like the Spanish Flu, with a huge death toll across all ages (as opposed to 1/10th the death toll, and mostly focused on older people and co-morbidities) it would have absolutely have looked like "a pandemic film".

I think there's a fallacy here in that "because covid's impact wasn't great, covid wasn't that bad." Any time we have to mobilize a lot of effort to head off the worst outcome, there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?" Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse.

It's our response to covid, not covid itself, that taught me a lot of what we're capable of in global crisis. We've come a long way since Spanish Flu.

Reminds me of the millennium bug.

Everyone worked really hard to make the impact minimal, now people assume that it wasn’t that big a deal.

Is there a name for the fallacy you commited here - assuming it must have been a big deal, which was necessarily minimized by the effort?

It's a case of:

-- Why do you spend all these millions putting these plastic scarecrows all across Nebraska?

-- They keep sharks away.

-- But Nebraska doesn't have sharks!

-- Exactly! See how effective it is?

It would seem to be a kind of variant on the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (after this, therefore because of this) fallacy — if one thing follows another the second must have been caused by the first.

Only in this case you are looking at denials where “propter hoc” actually holds — the second thing really was caused by the first.

There really should be a catchy name for this, since it permeates a lot of political reasoning on topics such as remediation for ozone hole depletion, FDC regulations, environmental regulations, etc. People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.

>People see that timely action averted a problem, but somehow take that as evidence that there wasn’t a problem in the first place.

Depending on the situation, 2 cases are possible (and have happened):

(a) A thing was indeed about to become a grave problem and timely action prevented it.

(b) A thing was never to become a big issue, and all the action spent preventing it didn't have any significance.

In both cases the outcome is "thing didn't become a big problem".

But in (a) action is what helped with this, and in (b) action was irrelevant and wasted.

Now some people see the outcome (no issue) and think that action was wasted. That's accurate in (a) and wrong in (b).

My point is that whether "timely action averted a problem" or "the problem was oversold to begin with" is something to be argued and proved, not taken for granted.

We know it could have been a big problem by the small things that got omitted and became problems.

You can argue that we didn’t need to pump hundreds of millions into it; but it is a fact that there would have been a crisis had it not been actively averted.

The same issue exists now with 2048 and we’re already seeing problems (on things that date far into the future) and we will likely need to expend effort and energy in avoiding this issue: especially on embedded devices.

If you’re denying that there would have been a problem then I’m afraid you’re simply mistaken.

I could give you many citations if I wasn’t on my phone. There was even a documentary about it.

“Was the millennium bug a myth” or something.

> there's a tendency to say "well nothing really bad happened, so why did we go through all that effort?

Basically a third of our country didn't go through that effort and the country is mostly still chugging along. Were it much deadlier, things would not have turned out okay.

The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread. Let’s take ebola as an example which was very feared due to it being quite deadly, yet a flu-like virus managed to infect many orders of magnitude more people.

A counterexample: HIV is pretty deadly, but slow to progress, so it infected a lot of people. In countries with insufficient healthcare infrastructure (Subsaharan Africa), it actually killed a significant percentage of the population, precisely because it was so successful in spreading. Without modern medicine, it could have wiped out entire cultures, especially those that were more sex-positive.

(An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)

Indeed as you and another commenter pointed out correctly, it is not the whole picture, and given an intelligent, evil design one could possibly create a disease that spreads fast and kills only much later (by let’s say, causing cancer). But fortunately we are not inside Plague Inc.

But if I am not mistaken, from a strictly evolutionary perspective there is no pressure towards such a disease — a genetic variation that is more deadly won’t dominate over its less deadly variant and thus deadliness could be a variable that only changes randomly from the initial level (and decreasing if it is actively detrimental to spreading, where I would say that in case of a human population deadliness does correspond with fear).

But IANAE, nor a mathematician.

> The more deadlier a virus, the rest likely it is to spread.

Not really. The two primary factors controlling how fast a disease spreads is the infectiousness (R0 or other similar measures), and how long victims are infectious before they display symptoms.

The deadliness, the victim living or dying, happens significantly after they've finished their role as spreader of disease and thus does not significantly affect the spread.

Ebola fails to spread, not because it's deadly, but because the symptoms are almost immediate and dramatic.

(I took graduate level course in the mathematics of epidemiology and got an A, which makes me no expert at all, but this is fairly fundamental.)

I gave the OP another example of a deadly and yet widespread virus, HIV.

He is not completely off the ball, though. Our immune systems are rather good, so (with significant exceptions like HIV) if some virus doesn't kill us quickly, we tend to clear it out of the organism or at least get it under control, so it won't kill us at all.

Viruses that are very deadly but take a long time to kill you (thus enhancing the risk of transmission), like HIV, aren't very typical.

This is a weird argument to make. The rational thing is to make different decisions in different scenarios. The choices I would make for how/whether to participate in society, whether to take a vaccine, etc., would vary greatly depending on whether a given disease has a 1 in 50,000 chance of killing me vs if it's like something out of the movie Contagion that would have a 1 in 10 chance of killing me.

If covid had a 1 in 10 chance of killing me I would have made very different decisions over the course of the pandemic. You're saying that people would still behave the same as they did during covid no matter how deadly a given disease is, which seems pretty ridiculous.

My state took it just seriously enough to get us to vaccines (and even before that, buy some time until they realized they shouldn't just put everyone on a respirator). For all I know it may have saved my life and the life of several other people I know with comorbidities. Possibly my parents as well.

Yes, a third of the country didn't go through the effort and a lot of people died in those states also. The country might still be functioning, but not necessarily well, with significant labor shortages, supply chain issues, high inflation, a looming recession, record high gas prices, etc. (not all of that is directly because of the pandemic, granted, but it sure didn't help).

I think we're in violent agreement.

>Let's not trivialize the global effort necessary to bring us to 1/10th the death toll. It absolutely could've been worse.

I'm not so sure, given places that did nothing or not much (either out of policy or lack of resources) and still didn't have a toll anywhere comparable to the Spanish Flu (and more or less comparable to places that took "great effort", if not better).

Let's also not take too much of a Western perspective, as only 16.2% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Well said. I think if the vaccines hadn't come out at all, it could well have been as bad as the Spanish Flu.

> I think if the vaccines hadn't come out at all, it could well have been as bad as the Spanish Flu.

I'm very much for vaccines, but this is just not true at all. Covid was never going to be near as bad as the Spanish flu, even if no measures were taken at all.

> The pandemic taught me a lot about apocalypse.

I don't think it has taught you much. All things considered, despite all the suffering by unlucky individuals, when you consider humanity as a whole, covid is an insignificant blip. If it's significant at all, it's only because of our response to it.

> Covid looked nothing like a pandemic film, thank god.

Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film. Humanity has seen way worse, and we could still see way worse in the future.

What COVID taught me is that the human ability to not give a fuck is apparently infinite. I have trouble processing the fact that a million people died (in the USA) and there is no mourning, no shared sense of tragedy or loss, no looking more kindly on other people, just a madder, faster dash on cash and even more finger-pointing.

> Covid was not 1% as bad as any pandemic featured in a film.

I'll be generous and not dwell on this stunning example of this age's inability to get bothered by anything unless it hits harder than film. Look on the bright side I guess, despite how soulless, empty, and glib we have to be do so!

Something like 5 million people die every year, should we be in permanent mourning?

> Something like 5 million people die every year, should we be in permanent mourning?

That gives truth to Benjamin Disraeli's (attributed) "Lies, damn lies, and statistics". Very misleading.

It was the concentrated effects.

When bottled oxygen ran out in India.

When you could not get into a hospital in many American cities (my American geography is hazy - South Los Angeles hospital, I think, was crippled for weeks)

Running out of morgue space in New York city - mass graves in central park.

It was really very scary, and I am glad I was not in any of those places badly hit.

I know you're trolling, but I'll respond. Part of growing up and moving from just a mere legally-licensed adult is being able to hold heavy things. They never stop getting heavier. They just keep unfolding, and if you are willing to grow just a little deeper--not bigger, but deeper, like the roots of you being able to feel things, then maybe all that learning to deal with loss, tragedies, loved ones dying, aging, your parents and uncles and cousins and friends dying--and yet not letting it destroy you, might be worth something. Though, for a moment, you can be devastated on the inside and hold yourself up without breaking. You don't need to cry your eyes out every day, but man, what the hell if we can't reflect on such a grievous time that has befallen us--all of us--over the past two years, without clawing someone else's face off or storming off in a huff. But if you need to feel not bothered at all, go ahead, you aren't the subject of this one.

> what the hell if we can't reflect on such a grievous time

You made the assumption the rest of us aren't. You've written a number of emotionally-laden statements about the lack of virtue amongst the rest of us, but I'm "trolling" when I point out you ignore greater loss of life happening yearly.

Unfortunately you are still trolling, and I hope you are aware enough to see it.

I'm not going to do all the work for you, because I'm tired and certainly tired of teaching critical thinking to adults, but take a look at _excess_ deaths since the COVID-era started[1].

That is key, just like all the fears of a devastating food shortage on the horizon because Putin needed to get his gun off.

Outside of math class, you can't play "Direct cause of death from COVID" vs. "people starved to death by their own government" or <insert issue you have feel the need to play "well, actually..." tonight>.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

Lately, I've been thinking about the role of nihilism as a natural force in society and its use as a tool of renewal. At its best, it's a power to take only that which strengthens so that we don't take on the collective emotional debt of past generations. It's why we're finding new ways to do old things all the time and why we aren't living in guilt over the deeds of past generations.

At its worst, nihilism throws the baby out with the bath water and you get holocaust deniers. This has been the hardest part of aging for me, because seeing this evolve in real time has left me in despair for our world at times. I have to remind myself that this force has been at work for centuries, and when I was young I didn't think it was all that bad. We'll probably be ok.

you "grown ups" locked me indoors for months and didn't let me see my family. spare me your sanctimony.

The world contains more people than just you and your family.

I was bummed to not see mine as well, but I (and they) also understood that a shared sacrifice was necessary to make.

a "shared sacrifice" that accomplished nothing.

> Something like 5 million people die every year,

Then why do we mount anything at all, death count of all terrorist attacks and shooting combined is insignificant

Why have we spent $2 trillion so far on Iraq (even if you believed it was linked to 9/11 and 3000 deaths) when Alzheimer's disease costs $200B annually and costing about 5 million a few decades of life? (I'm approximating lost QALY as ~5 million/year, or about 20x 9/11s every year)

We should be investing in high ROI life-saving actions, not emotional impulses. Let's put serious money behind defeating aging, which currently has a 100% fatality rate and was highly comorbid with COVID-19.

https://www.alzheimers.net/research-spending-vs-annual-care-...

Defeating aging sounds like a horrible idea as long as we aren't able to conquer space. The planet is badly overpopulated already as it is.

The world is nowhere near overpopulated, most countries are going to see population crashes if anything.

“Overpopulation” is a meme from the 60s coming from a book (Population Bomb) that was disproved the instant it was published. It is, however, a big reason for single family zoning in California - they literally thought it would encourage people to stop moving there and having kids.

Overpopulation - a number - is the wrong metric. Instead, we should be looking at the mix of factors (which include overpopulation) that cause the destruction of ecosystems, all the way up to climate change. So that would include: mono-agriculture ('monoculture'), technology powered by fossil fuels (such as logging machines, strip mining machines, etc.), and global transport networks (which hugely enable demand to outstrip supply).

More complicated, but more accurate - and humanity is way past that threshold, even with population crashes.

Long lived organisms tend to procreate less. If you look at fertility of humanity right now, it is obvious that countries with the lowest life expectancy are experiencing the biggest population booms. Long lived nations aren't even sustaining themselves.

It's about 52 Million. Or 144k per day.

It's always fun to look back at how wrong people are about the future. It's almost happening in real time these days.

That's not what the likes of the poster you reply to want. They want you to be in permanent acceptance of whatever agenda they support with their virtue signalling.

Still, historically people have died from diseases at a much higher rate than even during the worst of COVID pandemics. I think if anything people should be more accepting towards death, recognizing it as a part of life that is eventually unavoidable to us all.

I guess one problem is that nowadays in Western world people often spend their last times in a hospital, rather than at home and their local communities. This doesn't give space for healthy mourning.

Ah the Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson argument. Be happy with what you have. Thus no progress any more.

I'd argue the opposite. If it's insignificant at all, it's only because of our response to it. Lots of people worked very, very hard for us to sit here typing "it wasn't that bad" unless you believe that our global covid response did very little to change the outcome. If you do believe that, though, there's probably little point in continuing this thread.

Yes, lots of people worked very hard to make the outcome better. I'm grateful to them for helping protect my aged relations. They did make a difference.

With that out, the Covid-19 pandemic, even without any measures at all, was still incredibly mild. Wikipedia says 0.1-0.3% global population lost [0]. It would have been I don't know, perhaps 0.5% without measures? Compare to the other pandemics on that list, you routinely see ones that wipe out 20-50% of the regional population - now that is significantly bad.

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

Those other pandemics are before we had any ability to defend ourselves or even know what was going on.

SARS-1 and MERS are quite fatal too but we stopped them from spreading.

> Those other pandemics are before we had any ability to defend ourselves or even know what was going on.

Yes, of course. And I'm simply adding that Covid-19 would be nowhere as bad as those even if we had no ability to defend ourselves.

Our response was actually what made it a much more insignificant blip (thanks public health + vaccines), and technically we aren't through it yet.

Wikipedia says 0.1-0.3% global population lost [0]. It would have been perhaps 0.5% without any response whatsoever. That's still insignificant compared to all the other pandemics, which seem to often kill 20-50% of the regional population.

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

Well I think that's using an assumption that if we had greater exposure (ie less public health measures/vaccines) for the virus it wouldn't mutate and cause more damage than it did in its current form and causing a step change in in impact.

Also wikipedia in and of itself is not a high quality source.

I'd argue that we are through it in the public health, government mandate, change how you live day-to-day sense of things. Everyone who is willing to get vaccinated is probably vaccinated at this point. There is very little support for more government intervention even as cases rise in various areas, regardless of political persuasion (at least in the US, maybe it's different in the UK and EU?)

The fact that COVID is still out there, infecting and mutating, is irrelevant to most people.

https://also.kottke.org/22/04/the-mass-delusion-of-the-pande...

We have a widely deployed vaccine.

COVID will live with us forever now, a pandemic has a few characteristics which make it so, one of which is capacity to overwhelm healthcare.

As soon as covid couldn’t overwhelm our healthcare systems it was over.

Now people will die every year with it, just like the flu.

Sad reality, but reality nonetheless, the fact we couldn’t handle a lock-down cemented that we would be living with it for the rest of human existence.

We still haven't really grappled with the aftereffects of long COVID. What we've done instead is say it's over because the acute phase is done with, and buried the reports of longer term issues. In other words, the health care system now simply returns wrong answers to triage its own capacity.

But that doesn't make it no longer a pandemic. We know quite well that we can normalize our way into wrong answers as a society. It'll only become clear where we stand after another year or two - either more and more people become disabled after their "mild" case, or it gradually trails off.

The vaccine only lasts six months. I am not sure how "widely deployed" it is anymore.

Children today, and their children, will gain immunity over an entire lifetime through repeated exposure.

So it is with all other coronaviruses, which have been around for millions of years and don't routinely kill older/vulnerable people.

T cell immunity lasts longer than that. The antibody counts are kind of like a “watched pot never boils” thing - we’ve just never bothered to look before so now everyone is stressing about it.

1. Well, d'uh.

Also, everything will require a network connection (which is where ubiquitous Internet via cable or satellite comes in). No Internet? Pfft, what, do you live without electricity, too?

2. Pay for these kinds of professions (ever increasing complexity, whether necessary or self-made + decently mentally taxing) will only go up. Not everyone can be a programmer, or a lawyer, doctor, video/audio editor, electrician, etc. Barring some catastrophic event or the creation of good enough AI/robots.

4+5. in 30 years, if current development rates continue, VR will be the next revolution. Super compact and efficient devices + a world where you can do almost anything you want will be very popular with the masses facing ever increasing costs, climate problems, joblessness, lack of housing, etc.

Why even put up with all the bs when you can do the bare minimum and use technological opium the rest of your time? I wonder if VR could be banned in the same manner as drugs, actually.

The reason I'm low confidence on pay is because I think there will be even more disparity among programmer salaries and the median will be far lower. Will it be possible to make a million a year as an engineer in 30 years (forget inflation for a moment)? Sure. However, I think there will be a lot more engineers making five figures. We're lowering the bar to do simple work all the time. Much like the other professions you mentioned, some make millions...others are far more middle-class.

As for the rest...they were in direct response to this article's predictions. My VR prediction is tongue-in-cheek because it's been "just around the corner" for the last thirty years. It's not far-fetched to think it'll still be "just around the corner" in another 30.

I would agree though for a different reason.

If society has to rebuild/replace infrastructure destroyed by more hurricanes, raise ports above new sea levels or build new ports, upgrade the power grid, food takes more resources to grow, etc, all using materials that are being desperately sought by every other nation on earth that's going to take every penny we can find anywhere and that means most salaries will be squeezed.

I'm torn about the high end, but my guess is even they will suffer because money is going to basic needs and even if you can help produce them for efficiently there isn't the kind of surplus we see today to reward you.

Software is going to be needed to control many many more automated systems especially as we age and don’t have replacement birthrates. So the demand, and therefore the pay, for highly skilled technical professions will only increase.

Climate change will mainly not affect the rich countries with computer programmers, except for secondary effects like California wildfires. It’ll mostly affect poor countries at the equator.

The median scientific projection is that every year will still be “better” economically than the one before it, including climate change costs, but that it’ll be about as bad as WW2 happening very slowly in the background.

> Programmer pay will decrease compared to other industries.

It is supply and demand for smart people. So far, demand for smart people increased throughout times. If earth will make more smart people or if they will be replaced/augmented with A(G)I, then pay will subside.

Are programmers really smarter?

Smarter than animal trainers?

Smarter than massage therapists?

Smarter than lawyers, artists, plumbers???

If we took a vote here, well we might be biased!

Agreed, a vote would hardly bring much extra information here.

I'd love to see data behind this question, but yes I believe that there is significant variation in the required intelligence to perform the highly various professions that the human race engages in. And I would claim – in all the humility I can muster speaking as a programmer myself – that the average programming job does inherently have a higher bar for intelligence than the average other profession.

It would be very wrong indeed to extrapolate from this information that one should TREAT individuals differently based on their choice of profession! Even if we knew for certain that the Brick Laying profession only consisted of the 1% most intelligent individuals and Data Entry Specialists the lowest 1%, treating individuals with these professions differently from a policy or cultural perspective would, in my opinion, be a great injustice.

The individuals may or may not be smarter, meaning they are a lot of smart people in professions that don't require it, but the computer related professions have a higher floor for intelligence to be successful, mainly abstract thinking.

I don’t think the constraint is smart people existing, it’s smart people choosing this career path. If we culturally produced more engineers (like some other countries do) then that could depress pay.

Human programmers will surely have comparative advantage over AGI that isn’t human at all, not to mention has no evidence of existing anytime soon.

I feel the same about 5. Do 3d movies still exist by the way ? Or IMax movies ?

Probably in the same way that VR does...it comes in waves. 3D has been around for a while, and every now and then it resurges. It has more to do with marketing forces to excite people about going to the theater than anything.

And yes, I suspect theaters will still be a thing unless teenagers find a new excuse to be unsupervised in the dark for a few hours.

IMAX is much bigger (brand + technologies) than what you probably think it is. As far as I know, IMAX and Dolby and maybe a few others are today's cutting edge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX

2. I can't see it getting any lower in Finland. Our job already pays (through the collective agreement) a woman's salary.

What is a woman's salary in Finland?

At any rate looking at it http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=73&locty...

http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=73&locty...

it looks like you're right, the median salary for programmers in Finland (4,830 EUR) is just a bit more than the median salary for everyone (4,320 EUR)

Most salaries are based on collective agreements. https://www.tyosuojelu.fi/web/en/employment-relationship/pos...

Tech sector: https://teknologiateollisuus.fi/sites/default/files/inline-f...

I make around 2300e before tax, and around 1900e after.

> What is a woman's salary in Finland?

Much less than a man's salary.

Calling it a "woman's salary" is a bit of an exaggeration, when mainly-women fields such as nursing requiring higher education pay about 2900-3500 EUR including extras from night shifts and sundays (or about 2500 without any extras).

But yes, programmers definitely are not overpaid in Finland. It's not unheard for fresh CS grads to be paid just 2500 EUR a month, though at least they have career progression unlike nurses forever stuck with such bad salaries...