so, thinking about global pandemics, I wonder how resilient US first world economy is. We lost a bit under 1% of the population in the Spanish Flu c. 1918, and it didn't much hurt us. Lincoln killed off 3% of the US population, and while it quite hurt the economy in CSA >
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9/ Chip fabs, at least some of them, close. Chip fabs and software depend on economics of scale. Ship half as many units, and you can't run at a profit. Not all of them, tho. I think we'd stay in the 21st century. ...but maybe not advance processor or RAM tech for 50 years.
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10/ Software sector probably shrinks ... but maybe not? with labor scarce, perhaps returns to automation CLIMB ? Fewer coders working on websites, more on robots ?
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11/ This is all at some number - I'm saying 40% death rate, world wide. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe these effects are at 25-30%, and 40-50% is actually a whole new level / type of reaction Instead of falling back to ~ 2005 tech, maybe the next level causes us to fall back to 1960?
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12/ One thing to think about is that technology level in 1960 wasn't merely defined by "what we've discovered / invented by 1960", but also "what the economies of scale of the 1960 customer base allowed". Look at action movies or video games. US population in 1960 was 180 M.
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13/ So a movie would have to cover its budget by selling tickets to ~ 180 M people, max. Today an action movie sells to US, EU, China, India. So the same movie can sell tickets to ~1.5 B people. 7x the market means 7x the budget.
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14/ and at that budget you can afford things that you couldn't afford at all at the smaller budget. So one tool (among many) to think about such things is to look at what tech level we supported at various population levels. We would, I think, partially retract that path.
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End of conversation
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I suspect satellites would get a higher priority than you think. The value additions of good weather forecasting and telecommunication alone would be worth the investment. A 40% hit would still leave us twice the population of Japan today, and they do fine.
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Look to infrastructure. If blue collar workers stay home during the pandemic itself and can't telecommute, how do we keep the lights on? How are goods moved? How do we maintain rail and highway infrastructure? How do we keep the phones running? How does that effect recovery?
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