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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This is the generic resilience debate that’s long overdue, via a “case study” that’s somewhere between a fire drill and the real SHTF thing. This is almost like the world itself is being administered a vaccine in the form of a partially deactivated crisis trigger.
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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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Replying to
one of the more significant aspects of this is how unremarkable the effects of the virus are for most people. it's like something designed to have difficult-to-comprehend effects on systemic risk.
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Everybody in West Africa (and elsewhere) lives with constant pressure of malaria (and other diseases and conditions). Everybody who's sexually active does with HIV (and other diseases and conditions). This scenario isn't unique beyond the fact of its being global and airborne.
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