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Comment by unity1001 | Hacker News Reader

> the distrust it created for big government, big pharma, and big tech.

No worries. The people will forget it just like they forgot the Iraq War, the Avandia drug scandal, the Three Mile island, the Mexican gulf oil leak, Iran-Contra and everything else.

They will vote in the election. The administration will change. And despite the incoming administrations will be staffed fully by the SAME people who staffed the administrations in the past 40 years, the people will think that something has 'changed' because the frontmen of the administration have different faces.

Then rinse and repeat.

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History strongly shows that epidemics do change political consciousness, toward psychological conservatism. It will take two generations (as with economic depressions) before things get anything like as loose and sloppy again. We'll fail in other ways, meanwhile. Eventually, UK citizens lost their faith in the aristocratic system. But they did. I may be kidding myself but I think there will be some permanent change from this.

> Eventually, UK citizens lost their faith in the aristocratic system. But they did. I may be kidding myself

To start with, getting fed up with aristocrats would be a revolutionary and progressive thing, not conservative. But it does not seem like there is enough such sentiment in the UK to change things. They still have their royals with veto power, they still have the unelected house of lords with aristocratic, religious and appointed hereditary members and the FPTP system. The house of lords can infinitely send back any bill to the parliament, by the way - which amounts to a total veto power.

Re aristocracy, I only mean that change happens drop by drop even when the movement toward it is all but invisible, sometimes.

Nothing happened at TMI

That’s not true. The extra cancer screening saved tens of lives and the strangling of the nuclear industry probably resulted in millions of excess deaths from pollution compared to if TMI had never happened.

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