Conversation

When this is all over, the question will be how to beef up things that collapsed under the stress. There will be calls to: Nationalize things that fail Privatize things that fail Distribute manufacturing more Distribute inventory more Distribute money more Distribute time more
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There will also be narrower conversation around pandemic response innovation: Touch-free built environment Rapid testing Agile vaccine development and deployment Social distancing based culture
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Conversations that are possible but unlikely to happen First-response acute mental health management Chronic stress management at population scale Ultra-wealthy flight/exit culture (cost of billionaire bunkerism, which is unfortunately totally a real thing) “Microgrid” economics
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I’m trying really hard to make a fair comparison to what I remember of SARS etc. Especially discounting for the effect of apocalypse larping by we the Very Online. This does feel different. It’s like living through a milquetoast Michael Crichton novel.
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It’s also very different from both 9/11 and Berlin Wall fall from what I can remember. Those were very human stories of extended impact. Here the star is a virus and the response after will be a reconsideration of the human-nature relationship, not human-human.
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It’s likely that there really is no living memory of something like this. People still alive (100+) who lived through Spanish Flu would have been babies in 1917-20.
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it seems just in the nick of time too so finely tuned so that a citizen effort miiight be fast enough to stop it, but central efforts fail it's like how the universe is flat -- it is like the virus is reshaping the probability landscape and rerooting everyone in time and space
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