Whatever your politics on generational demographic/power imbalance in an aging population that’s living longer, thinking of a pandemic as a rebalancing force is dumb at Thanos levels of simplistic meathead politics. Your instinct to treat your parents as exception reveals why
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Humans evolved to take care of elderly for complex reasons and it shows up as instinct to look out for one’s own parents. The previous generation is your future. You’ll likely live longer than today’s 70+ crowd. What you do today for them is what will be done for you in 30 years.
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Trying to get ahead of the inevitable macabre/dank anti-boomer glee narrative. If I can think this thought others can likely go nuts with it.
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Thread on older contagion reads, movies etc
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Thread of good older things to do with pandemics. Old classic on bureaucratic heroism, riffing on the Contagion movie nplusonemag.com/online-only/on
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‘The message from the federal government was blunt. “What they said on that phone call very clearly was cease and desist to Helen Chu,” Dr. Lindquist remembered. “Stop testing.”’ via stratechery.com/2020/zero-trus
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To be clear this is one thing that can be directly blamed on Trump systematically dismantling/undermining the CDC’s mission for 2+ years. It’s not generic bureaucratic malaise and incompetence. For once Hanlon’s razor does not apply. This is active malice.
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On a more personal front, my office is now on WFH protocol. Kinda ironic that the one year in a decade that I have an actual office to go to, it gets shut down. I was kinda enjoying larping the paycheck life while it lasted.
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I only have a few terry pratchetts left to go, and am saving them up as emergency cheer rations for later. Quarantine escapism is going to be tough.
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Forecasting thread on before/after shifts.
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Post-pandemic before/after speculative prediction/forecasting thread. Will try to capture ideas that occur to me in a non-valuative way (ie, avoid tagging as dark age/return to light)
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Thread on testing debacle
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WHY AMERICA HAS NO IDEA HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE #COVID19 :
(thread in response to @devisridhar query)
1.) In January Trump admin decided CDC would invent test kits, FDA would approve them
2.) CDC kits stalled at FDA approval stage for long time
3.) States started screaming
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In general, what makes this a narrative collapse is that it is the first true social media pandemic, where the possibility of conducting a global conversation in real time changes what it means to us. This pandemic will be live tweeted in exactly the way Spanish Flu was not.

