This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off.
In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I did not mention any party, that perennial misdirection to their collective heist. Also don't fall for the other smoke screen of small vs. big government. I demand at least a competent government.
For politicians truth is whatever you make people believe it to be.
Meanwhile engineers and scientists struggle daily to find the hard facts of the world to painstakingly build or discover something that improves lives. We should be disgusted and revolted at who is leading us right now. We should drive these fools out office and strip them of any respect.
If we don't, there will be no one competent left in position to rebuild from this, or the next, catastrophe that "nobody" could have expected. Or maybe there will be some states or localities that can get their act together, and the rest will be a wasteland of warring cultural and racial tribes.
Quite tired and ill right now so I'm unfortunately not going to be able to write this out even slightly well... but for some reason, I want to post the thought anyway so I will. (Note: I'm a U.S. citizen)
In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusion that the majority of the population of the U.S. deserves the work of engineers and scientists at this point. Now - obviously, you could say "well, they didn't ask for the engineers/scientists help" - but they definitely want the ability to receive some sort of medical care, and if they stop having a new phone to buy every year on the dot... some vocal portion of the populace will be quite unhappy.
Getting into how I actually feel about politics would be pretty irrelevant/pointless. However - I do think the U.S. is at the point where the average HN goer would agree the current government is a shitshow. Making that statement - I obviously agree with it. However, I've reached a point where I truly believe I'd rather have another four years of this administration, in a sincere hope that things keep going downhill and get exponentially worse, just so some drastic form of change and restructuring will have to happen - either that, or just the U.S. becoming a completely failed nation and engineers/scientists just jump ship to a more competent country.
Not trying to troll in the slightest in posting this. Am I crazy, or does anybody else feel the same way?
You talking like, U.S. declaration of Independence, or more/less recent than that...?
While my mind is fuzzier now, I like to think it was a "things change for the better" else - engineers/scientists completely stop giving a fuck about helping the U.S.
That's one example of something totally different. In order for this to be the same thing, someone would have to platform on removing the constitution or something
And also there's no rule that says it will get worse, either. When you have competent people making the rules, there's a good chance it gets better
Trump's election reflected a popular belief that rule by establishment experts was so intolerable, literally anything else would be better. It was the same passionate, desperate anger, the same "fuck it, let the world burn" strategy, just pointed in the opposite direction.
I think your sentiment is understandable given the state of affairs. Have you spent time reading about past societies that have undergone collapse?
While it may seem daunting, changing the system before a point of no return would historically be the right move.
Historically, the most likely outcome of your strategy is a shift towards more oligarchs and feudalism.
Have a look at Russia, Iraq, China (post ww2), etc.
I don’t think there is any reason to be optimistic about “drastic change” being change for the better. It very well can go both ways, and historically tends to the worse.
And almost all those people are people whose lives will not be affected negatively by 4 more years of the terrible administration, so they get to enjoy moral outrage while others bear the burden of feeding their moral indignation.
On the other hand, people whose lives are actually getting destroyed don’t have the same luxury. On a personal note, I have colleagues whose entire lives have been upturned thanks to this administration, but fortunately they are extremely skilled so they were simply able to recall rate by building their lives elsewhere in a country where the administration is not trying to make their lives miserable. The same cannot be said for the many millions of others who are suffering negatively thanks to the admin (especially the many tens of thousands who will be dead due to COVID who wouldn’t have been in a bare minimum competent admin).
30 millions jobs lost and counting.
70,000 deaths in the US alone.
No international cooperation.
No organized plan to contain the pandemic, or even demonstrate confidence. to the markets.
The endless stream of scandals before that can only be dismissed if you buy into the endless propaganda machine.
Strictly speaking, that's not true. The world is now aware of how painfully unprepared we are for cataclysmic events, like pandemics.
The world now also knows how dangerous China is due to the dangers of offshore supply chains, the disinformation they spread which endangered lives, and the dangerously strong influence they have over the WHO.
These are all good things and we're better off knowing them.
We've known all this before and could have done something about it if there was a collective political will more mature than that of self obsessed child.
There is no logical link between willfully making our own government incompetent and corrupt just so we can realize how unprepared we are. That sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe you've known it. The people at large did not and now they do. Anti-China policy was often viewed as racist. Don't underestimate the power of common knowledge to influence the political winds.
I don’t know why you are trying to convince me or why you think providing figures will change the fact that a large portion of the country feels one way. You can’t argue your way out of that fact.
I'm not, my reply wasn't meant for you. I think that deceptive propaganda like yours shouldn't go unchallenged or else it seems like it has more credibility than it deserves in the eyes passersby on forums like this.
As a person that does not support Trump I find it hard to believe that I am creating deceptive propaganda.
However, I will fix it for you, zero percent of the US supports Trump or believes he has made the country a better place. There is a zero percent chance he will win the next election. Is that the delutional propoganda you prefer?
Great, and how are they going to vote in the upcoming elections? The parent was not discussing Trump's popularity wrt to the world because frankly, that doesn't matter, what matters is changing public opinion within the US.
I'm a software engineer and have given considerable thought to leaving the US because I am struggling to come to terms with how my taxes are spent and politics in general here. It's universally bad. I'm considering Finland, Sweden, Norway, or Switzerland. They all rank high in happiness, high in democratic representation, and low in corruption. All are difficult to immigrate to but I basically feel a moral obligation to explore the option
Switzerland is difficult to immigrate to, wouldn't say the same about Finland, Sweden and Norway though, quite the contrary if you are a software engineer.
The only issue I do have with leaving is the war thing. The past few years, I've really been telling myself we're probably at the point that China really does have the U.S. militarily beat if it comes down to it... but despite how many of us HN'ers are aware of some frivolous military budget spending (like literally doing something, tearing it down, and doing it again to spend the budget) - some of those hundreds of billions of dollars are definitely going into tech capable of destroying human life in ways really can't imagine. Plus, if it would somehow come down to large amount of humans actually fighting... the arrogance many Americans have is quite helpful for that.
Moving to a smaller country, I don't know how I would feel in World War just because of population numbers and physical location. Given the arguments we can see between humans in U.S. states, and knowing how trivial it truly is to something like the ideologies of the CCP... I fully expect serious global conflict within my lifetime. That's the one thing I do atleast think I feel safer with being in the slightly rural MidWest than a smaller country....
Maybe this is getting away from the point of things. But fuck. I've experienced a lot of physical pain in life from my body falling apart, but in my mind, the horrors that could be experienced in war makes it seem like nothing. I'd just not like to die in a horrible way because of dumb fucking shit. However, that's probably stupid of me seeing as how that's how most of human history has been.
The only reason we've had relative peace since WW2...
I would question that assertion. The number of large scale wars between countries has certainly fallen in the past 75 years (and was falling before then too), and the number of deaths from war has also fallen dramatically, but the number of wars and state-based conflicts has gone up significantly - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-i... - and back in 2014 there were only 11 countries on Earth not officially involved in at least one war - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/world-peac...
Globally, the conflicts we have are smaller and less visible, and kill fewer people, but we have less peace now than we've ever had.
Don't you have the missile silos in rural Midwest. A truly global conflict with existential fear in major powers, will get hot. But currently the US could absolutely devastate China atomically, but China would only be able to take swings at major US cities.
Everyone will be losers but as things currently stand, China would loose the most.
Oh yeah, someone will technically "win" a full exchange, I'm sure. The brass may see high survival rates. But the infrastructure will be bombed away. It will take decades to rebuild. One can't even compare to anything before and extrapolate. There have been local disasters and rebuilding, but we have never seen a complete national system bombed away and what will come after.
(A variant of a worst case I haven't even considered before is a full nuclear Armageddon, and then Command and Control survives to take nuclear potshots for years afterwards. For instance if one party has still substantial conventional forces but the other manages to from time to time scrounge up another nuke and launch it.)
I could see them have more ICBMs than apparent, but successful SDI I don't think is possible, not against nuclear strike submarines in any case.
I didn't like it that much, but didn't need too much suspension of disbelief to see it as a realistic possibility.
Think of all the televangelists, megachurches, religious fundamentalists and so on. What happens in dire times? People flock to such things. There is no 'rationality" in it, just instinct. Thereby worsening the chance of the outcome you wish for.
I felt the smarter way would be to ridicule these horror clowns as much as possible, so their incompetence would obvious to almost everyone. But somehow that seems to not even matter.
Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely because he did not want those.
(On the grandparent, I have to agree that occasionally I feel like the development of society at large is kept hostage by morons. Not only politics, but practically everything seems to be built for the lowest common denominator. It may really be that one day in the future some kind of Galt's Gulch is needed. Only Rand is going to be turning in her grave. If not for any other reason, then because in this gulch the members are pissing on her grave.)
(I don't want to get into a pedantic fight over Any Rand / objectivism / Atlas Shrugged, I simply want to share an alternative viewpoint)
It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she tried to paint a realistic picture, ultimately Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction that falls apart when placed within real-world constructs, especially 50+ years on after its publication.
At the heart of it, what Rand appeared to most argue in Atlas Shrugged was against regulation and governance that superseded the inalienable rights of citizens plus centralized power in an authoritarian state and took away the economic agency of the individual. That doesn't preclude a functioning republic where people can own businesses, own the rights to their creations, and still pay taxes for the benefits of services best provided by government.
Now here's the irony: Rather than coming for our system via communism, which was Rand's concern, instead it was nominal capitalists who came to destroy the system via regulatory capture. I don't see what the right-wing, nominal capitalists in the US have done to be any different than the moochers in Rand's book.
To me both communism and right-wing (brutalist aynrandian) capitalism are the same in some sense. Both are somewhat nice ideologues in naive theory. But if you bring them to real world, communism brings you Soviet Union and right-wing capitalism brings you regulatory capture moochers or warlords, depending a bit on your flavor of capitalism.
The major difference is that only some insignificant weirdos in the fringes have not agreed that communism is stupid in practice. Brutalist aynrandian ideology is much more prevalent problem and needs to be somehow gotten into same ridiculed state as communism as an actual feasible ideology.
Hopefully not getting too lost in the pedantry, and I'm absolutely not a Rand supporter (though I had my 16-year old Atlas Shrugged phase where I actually read the whole damn book).
a) You're spot on she didn't want to destroy the govt. She was explicitly a minarchist, and she swapped major arugments and ridicule with the Ancaps of the time (like Murray Rothbard)
b) The communism hate gets floated most, but my read of Atlas Shrugged was that she placed the collectivists at the same evil level as the church, crony capitalists, and postmodernists, to the point of having characters who 1-dimensionally represented each of them (she's literally got a lobbyist character called "Wesley Mouch").
That's why it's always hilarious to me when I see neocon congressfolk saying that Atlas Shrugged is their favorite book: she hated the church as much as the government (and would've likely hated those politicians as well).
This really resonated with me. I am very sad to say that I agree with you. I'm a PhD student elsewhere now, but did my undergrad at UPenn in the States and was absolutely disgusted by the framing of science/learning/academia in the country in general (as well as the country's general level of media discourse). Of course, school itself was wonderful, and I'm blessed to have had such humbling peers there; that stood as such stark dichotomy with the country as a whole. The social moment very much felt like I imagine being a Soviet biologist watching Lysenko come to power would. I worked so hard for social good in the US, but it all felt futile. I chose a respectable opportunity at a program in my home country (Canada) over higher-ranked options in the US because of it. I know a number of friends who similarly chose foreign programs over previously more desirable American ones.
Trump 2020 only since it seems not enough people think we haven't learned sht and hell, think we are somehow a better country because of him. Let it burn and maybe AOC can start with a clean slate in 2024.
That may well be ok for you to say but thousands of people have already died as a direct consequence of Trump's presidency. Hundreds of thousands more have been penalised for their race, beliefs, sexuality, etc. Generations to come will suffer because of the regulations they're undoing and the courts they've packed with Federalist wingnuts. Have some compassion, c'mon.
Thousands in the Middle East died from Obama's presidency. At a certain point you start to think that the "lesser of two evils" strategy just shifts the playing field to be ever-increasing in its evil across the board.
And thousands in the Middle East died from Bush's presidency. And millions died during Reagan's because he bungled AIDS. You can whataboutism all day but it helps no-one.
Absolutely. I don't mean to make the issue a partisan one, but to point out that it is distinctly non-partisan (at least between the Democrats and Reuplicans).
I don't think it's whataboutism if the argument is about whether The Other Guy will also end up being responsible for the death of thousands (or more) from some other event (planned or unplanned).
Not making an argument for either side, I just don't think it's whataboutism to argue that the variance of the incompetence of US presidents isn't very high.
> the variance of the incompetence of US presidents isn't very high
Bush: thousands dead through incompetence in the USA (Katrina, 9/11)
Obama:
Trump: thousands dead through incompetence and malice in the USA (ICE, COVID-19)
I've taken out the "overseas wars" because that's shared across all of them.
I've had the same thought and it sickens me that we've come to this point.
As someone who has made the transition from teenager to young adult during the Trump era, I feel like I've lost a game I never even had the chance to play. We have clearly gone so far off course but very few seem interested in steering us back to reality (between the impeachment "trial", the primaries, and our handling of COVID-19).
After four years of the disaster that is the Trump administration, any establishment Democrats like Biden elected to office will be praised no matter what they do, simply by virtue of not being Trump. But that's not real progress. They'll continue to neglect wealth inequality / infrastructure / privacy / technology issues.
And Trump isn't the problem, he's just a convenient distraction from the fact that big money controls both parties. It's just that establishment Democrats more or less want to maintain the status quo, while conservatives are using Trump to brazenly roll back regulations.
Four years from now, we'll have even more damning evidence about the true long-term economic/social/environmental damage done during his term (as if it weren't clear enough). If he's not in office long enough, this will all be blamed on the next president, adding more fuel to the fire for a likely 2024 run.
Or worse: Someone more cunning but just as evil comes along, charming voters while more adeptly covering up their true intentions.
Our only hope this that enough voters get really pissed off enough to vote in every local, state, and federal election consistently enough for the next couple decades so that we can start to heal.
Biden's not going to inspire that. Bernie, maybe, had the chance to. Trump will do it. And if we can't survive another four years of Trump, we don't deserve to.
I agree, but at least it seems like we're incrementally moving in the right direction, even if at a glacial pace. The fact that a 27-year old AOC was elected shows that people are fed up with establishment politicians and change is possible (prior to being elected she was a bartender with no money or connections, who ran on a grassroots campaign of being fed up with politicians taking corporate money and serving corporate interests over their citizens, and beat a Democrat who'd been in power for ~15 years).
Once the older generation dies out and the younger generation takes over, we'll start to see some real progress. Imagine where we could be if more of our politicians resembled people like Andrew Yang - young normal uncorrupted people who grew up in the internet generation. The problem is that most of our politicians are too old (average Senator is 61 years old) and are completely removed from the real issues facing Americans.
The problem is that when the older generation dies out, the younger generation is no longer young, and their attitudes have changed. Not quite to the same exact conservative/anti-progressive place that their parents and grandparents occupied, but definitely more conservative than they were when they were younger.
We'll see progress, to be sure (and that's good!), but it won't be as dramatic as you think. It'll likely be similar to the last several generations of progress.
That's true to an extent, but I think this time is different because the millenials have had to endure so much obvious hardships as a direct result of the baby boomers' incompetence (eg. student debt), and because millennials grew up with the internet and all the information that gives one access to. Politicians like Bernie and AOC are more in line with how millennial stand (my Boomer dad doesn't understand what they're so angry about), and if those policies were implemented, that'd be a massively different society than today.
Bernie had the main-stream media + the entire DNC apparatus against him. That's a ton of power and influence.
I'm not saying he would've 'won'; it's quite possible he positioned himself as too much 'non-establishment', or perhaps too little. but saying he didn't inspire people to vote for him in the primary is not evident, IMO.
I feel like there are many more folks that would vote for Trump in spite of Biden "winning" the Democratic nod. 1000% agree that the next president is going to be left holding the bag of sht and get blamed for everything so might as well let it be Trump.
Are you referring only to the current administration? Aren't prior administrations also guilty since they did not prepare for an electrical grid collapse either?
As op predicted, there is always one that tries to derail the discussion into the false distinction between parties, administrations or what have you. As opposed to working towards solutions that may save lives, let's spend the next decade or two throwing blame and arguing. Classic use of what-aboutism to muddy the waters.
The problem is largely the democratic system itself. The average U.S. Senator spends 2/3 of their time fundraising during the last 2 years of their term. Half of Congress are millionaires, their salaries are in the 95th percentile ($174k/yr), and they receive world-class healthcare. The electoral college means Trump and Bush get elected despite losing the popular vote. We're limited to a two-party system because third-party votes count for nothing, limiting the spectrum of ideas. American satisfaction with their own government is ~34%.
What pisses me off more the problems themselves in our society (terrible healthcare system that ties healthcare to employment, outrageous university tuition + student debt crisis, homeless crisis) is the fact that we all know and agree these are problems, have known for decades, yet do nothing about it. 9 of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred since 2005, yet we do little to nothing about climate change. Epidemiologists and public health experts saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in January, yet it takes the crisis actually hitting us to start acting. We get some fiscal stimulus, but the people get relative scraps while most of it goes to wealthy corporations. I still don't even know if I qualify for the COVID checks because the government website tells me "Payment Status Not Available".
For example take tax filing. In most countries, filing taxes is effortless and takes about 2 seconds - log into a government website, verify that the information the government already has on you is correct, and submit. But in the U.S., citizens are forced to waste time manually filling out all these tax forms and pay private companies money (eg. TurboTax, now there is e-filing, but ). It doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, or a member of the Nazi Party, we can all agree that making tax filing take as little time and effort as possible is superior to having to take more time and effort. Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy as countries like Sweden, South Korea, etc.
We can definitely improve things significantly by electing better politicians, but that can only go so far within the confines of our current money-driven two-party system. We need a system that more accurately reflects the will of the people. Rank-based voting would enable third parties, liquid democracy would enable citizens to vote directly on issues without having to be beholden to elected officials. Experts should be in charge of their domains of expertise, specially when it comes to science (eg. public health experts in charge of public health policy). Politicians can decide what gets taxed, who gets the money, and vote on laws, but beyond that we need competent people managing what they're competent at, and a system that's proactive rather than reactive.
Too bad it's taboo to even suggest that a system of government devised over 200 years ago when people were riding around on horses may not be the most efficient in the 21st century.
EDIT: Rather than simply downvoting because you disagree (which is not what the downvote tool is designed for by the way), how about taking a second to explain what you disagree with?
Many people dislike the 'easy verify and submit' system of taxes, because they think it basically hides taxes from the public. There are similar objections to employer deduction of taxes. Additionally, the current system of many different taxes on different things makes it very hard for a voter to understand what their total tax burden is (especially if there are VATs which are included in prices). For these reasons, many think 'simplified' taxes are anti-democratic.
As an example; more voters know how much they spend on Netflix or Amazon Prime than how much they spend on government, meaning they are better equipped to hold streaming services accountable than their government, even though the latter costs them (at least) hundreds of times more.
How can "easy verify and submit" hide taxes from the public?
Here in Sweden I receive my tax form pre-filled in a digital mailbox (basically a PDF of the tax form I'd get through snail mail on a website), I can see on the first page the total amount of tax paid, how much I owe or will receive as tax return and then another section with more details about interest I've paid, how much of that was deducted from my taxes, etc.
In about 5 minutes I have an overview of all the taxes paid from my income, how much went to the national, kommun/local government and I'm done.
I don't follow what is the argument about how making this process simple is considered anti-democratic.
While the discussion of direct vs indirect taxes is interesting, the article just flatly asserts that Swedes are unaware of their tax burden without a shred of proof. That’s not convincing.
> because they think it basically hides taxes from the public
Well that's factually false because taxpayers can see all the information and verify it for themselves (that's what they're supposed to do before they verify it). Who exactly is arguing that making tax filing easier is "anti-democratic"? A couple American tax extremists? The Intuit lobby?
If the U.S. can't even make something as simple as tax filing easier, then the U.S. is hopeless when it comes to bigger issues. We're already the only country without universal healthcare and where an undergraduate degree at a public school costs six figures. How can we fix those bigger and more "complex" problems if we can't even fix something as dead simple and bipartisan as tax filing?
"many people dislike"... Could you find even a sizeable proportion of the population that felt this way? as with the re-open states protests these things are easily gamed by interested parties and it takes a vocal minority, which is amplified by media voices, such as Fox news, where it aligns with their owners beliefs to make it seem more of an issue than it is.
having taxes included in the price when I buy something at a store makes lige easier for consumers. I dont need to know everytime I pay some tax exactly how much has been paid.
I honestly read your comments as a sort of astroturfing with your use of 'many' as if to mean a significant number of people, rather than the reality, which is 'some people', indicating a whole lot less people but more than 1.
you are being worked over by special interest groups who are being led on by some rich people who have their opinions and are forcing every one to live by them.
TurboTax lobby officially to make tax filing difficult in the US, they will also spend money under the radar to give voice to the 'individual' who is anti tax because it benefits Turbo Tax not because they align with the individual, but because it helps their bottom line.
I get what you're saying, but you're essentially doing the same thing as the person you're replying to: you're asserting, without evidence, that, if there's some group of people who want taxes to be more in-your-face, then it must be a small, vocal minority. I agree that the parent should provide sources to back up their claim, but you must do the same if you want to be taken seriously.
> Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy
Normally I’m all about Hanlon’s razor (assume stupidity before malice), but given the absurd amount TurboTax spends lobbying against any meaningful simplification you can’t fully pin place this on gov’t incompetence.
I don't think GP was blaming TurboTax. They were arguing for blaming this on government malice instead of government incompetence (i.e. the reverse of Hanlon's Razor).
This attitude is toxic and worse, incorrect. The majority of Americans did not vote for our President. I live in Austin, and my state district in TX includes a tiny slice of a city hundreds of miles away, Houston. Many state districts are like this, gerrymandered to prevent my vote from counting. Some places have it worse, DC, the capital, has no representation at all (fun trivia: Google the DC license plate).
The voters didn't ask nor vote for our government. The government picked the voters...
The 50% of people who didn’t vote in the last election are equally responsible for the current President as those who did (and every president prior, too).
I agree wholeheartedly that a democratic government reflects its voters. A largely apathetic, non-voting populace exaggerates the effect of gerrymandering, campaign finance and media manipulation.
Also due to the electoral college and the winner-take-all way in which voting is designed in the U.S, your vote for president only matters if you live in a swing state. If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
I am well aware, but that has nothing to do with the almost half of eligible voters who didn't vote at all. Californians who didn't vote in 2016 (~9m) far outnumber Hillary's margin over Trump (~4.3m). There's only "no point voting for president in California" because 9m Californians don't vote. That's nothing to do with "the system", that's a choice that every single one of those 9m voters is making.
Which brings me back to my original point, which is that voter apathy exacerbates the influence of gerrymandering and campaign spending in winning elections.
> If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
Winner-take-all in any state that leans predominantly in one direction means that your vote doesn't matter. Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they voted or not. Winner-take-all means all the delegates go to the winner.
It has everything to do with the system. Instead of just preaching that people should vote, maybe take a look at why they aren't. Maybe some don't because they can't get off work and unlike many other countries, election day isn't a national holiday. Or maybe because they don't feel like it makes a difference. If you don't live in a swing state, then one is right to feel like their presidential vote doesn't make a difference because as I just explained, it doesn't, and it shouldn't be that way.
> Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they voted or not.
Perhaps if more people voted in places like CA, the discrepancy between the popular vote and the actual winning candidate would be shown to be so absurd that we could actually get a movement going to successfully change how we elect our leaders.
Then again, it's possible (likely?) that would be matched by more people in red states voting such that the margins would end up the same.
As someone in predominantly blue state, I make a point to vote 3rd party. 15% of the popular votes means they get to be in the debates. At least it's something....
What makes you think non-voters would vote much differently than voters? To me it seems like voting is something like a survey, and we have about fifty percent of the population responding. If all non-voters voted, I'd expect roughly equal electoral results.
Of course, you might mean that you just want the half of non-voters who agree with you to vote, but that's a different thing.
As a DC resident, it does feel really frustrating, at a time when the nation's politics feel especially important, to not even have a representative to speak with/pressure. Especially when the chief argument against DC statehood has been that it'll tip the Senate to the left. BS.
You miss the applicability of the saying because you drastically overestimate the capability of the average American.
Hell, ignoring the deplorable level to which standards have been lowered by perverse incentives to pass students, the US only has an average of 80 HS graduation rate.
These are your voters. People who struggled to make it through high school have just as much of a day over your governments, your legislation, as you do. Do you expect uneducated and/or ignorant voters to make good decisions?
You can rise up and fix the system and get the leader you deserve, or you can complain about and do nothing else, and in that case you'll end up with the leader you deserve.
This is more of the same sanctimonious toxicity. You don't know me. I already donate to act blue. I already go to political rally's. I already help get friends to go vote. I already am a member of local political groups. I am still not represented. No state or federal ballot I have ever cast has counted.
Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and basic decency, no matter what. Even if they make a mistake. Especially then. People deserve better.
Disclaimer that I use similar remarks to the quote you disagree with. This is with the understanding that the price that needs to be paid will literally take lives at times, and that there is little to no fairness at who bears that cost.
That being said, you seem to be quite active politically and doing more than most in this arena. At what point do you give up and move to where you think you'll be represented? This is assuming you have the means to go elsewhere. Some people operate on moving to where they are treated best, that includes the option of a different country.
> Disclaimer that I use similar remarks to the quote you disagree with. This is with the understanding that the price that needs to be paid will literally take lives at times
I guess it's easy to make those kinds of remarks when you know you won't be the one paying that price, huh?
Repeating it over and over in every post you make doesn't make it true. It just shows your callous disregard for humanity, which isn't likely to win you much agreement.
You guys are showing a callous disregard for reality. Read about all the societies that have succumb to tyranny, it has happened many times. America is no special exception, and it's making all the same mistakes. Keep singing Kumbayah and see where it gets you.
You're right that nobody is blameless. But we can't abandon everyone to destructive whims of the minority. In the US only about 23% of the possible voting public won the last presidential election.
It's not just voting. I'm to blame for inaction and not running for office. As an engineer I could have something credible to say about many pressing issues. By why would I ever enter a race that is decided not on any values I uphold, but by manipulating the under-educated. Somehow the message did not win many races: "Vote for a scientist or an engineer or you may die from the next catastrophe that nobody believed us when we said we should prepare for it."
The issue in America is split between cultural baggage and the first-past-the-post voting system.
FPTP voting collapses into a two-party system, which ultimately leads to a government and people at war with itself. Under such a system, compromises become impossible, sabotage the norm, and nobody can get anything meaningful done anymore. The loudest man wins.
The cultural baggage comes from the Cold War. If you look at popular media from the time, you'll see a very strong connection between "communism" and "science" (because the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life). American TV, books and movies conflated science and anything "sciency" with commies and conspiracies to enslave the common man, but it's hard to blame them since they were taking their cue from the spirit of the times.
To this day, there are few countries with such a heavy distrust of science as America has. And since the alternatives for explaining complex things are religion, superstitions, and "folksy wisdom", it's no wonder that such people get elected to office. And since it's a two-party system, belligerence is a virtue.
the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life
Perhaps you need to read some history. USSR socialist "science" resulted in a horrendously mismanaged economy and multiple famines (1920s: 5+ million dead; 1930-33, another 5 million; 1946-47: over 1 million dead).
In all three cases, the leading relief efforts (and vast improvements to Soviet agriculture) were provided by those "anti-science" Americans.
Given what a horribly ignorant "anti-science" place America is, it's baffling that so many of y'all want to go there to live.
I'm well aware of what happened in the USSR. What they believed and what actually happened are entirely different things.
My point is that the USSR's fanatical devotion to a flawed religion of "science" had ripple effects to the USA, their sworn mutual enemy. When one side takes on a slogan to rally their tribe, the opposing side must distance themselves from it, which in this case meant that America distanced itself from trust in their own scientific institutions for fear of appearing to support the enemy tribe's position (it was an ideological and cultural war, and everyone was watching). That official distrust of science spread into a cultural distrust that resonates to this day.
Note: I'm not blaming America here; this is the nature of culture (regardless of who it is), and it couldn't have happened any other way in their competition, given Moscow's "science the saviour" position. It's just unfortunate that this is part of the fallout.
My point was that there are a lot of competent people. Take a look through any HN thread and you'll find scores of highly intelligent, very wise, and uncorruptible individuals who would certainly do better than many in power today.
To say that we'll run out of competent people to lead is nonsense.
Their estimate was $600 billion - $2 trillion dollars of damage from an event that happens roughly once ever 150 years on average. Therefore the amortized cost of this risk per year is $4 - $13 billion.
If a substantial fraction of the risk can be mitigated over the next decade for $300 million, it would be cheap at 10x the price. In fact Berkshire Hathaway probably has enough exposure to this risk that it makes financial sense for them to not debate over who pays and to just create the stockpile to reduce potential future insurance claims.
According to that document, it cost the Canadian government over a billion dollars just to mitigate a substantial fraction of the risk in one province. It talks about them installing protection devices to reduce the risk of damage - just reduce, not completely eliminate - on a thousand of the most at-risk transformers. I don't think having the ability to replace 9 transformers is going to help much here.
Sure, the failure of the correct combination of 9 might be able to shut down the grid. That's only likely to happen as the result of a direct, human-planned attack - any disaster would inevitably have to destroy more than the minimum to get a correct combination, probably including a whole bunch of smaller transformers. And crucially, destroying just those key transformers alone wouldn't be enough to stop the grid from being restarted - the generation infrastructure is distributed locally throughout the grid, so even if regions couldn't be reconnected they could operate independently with reduced reliability and capacity if necessary. In order to cause a massive months-long blackout that killed 90% of Americans, any event would have to destroy a whole bunch of local, distributed infrastructure, and stockpiling a handful of transformers would not be enough to replace that.
Not sure it makes any sense to be prepared for anything when FEMA will just raid your inventory and send it to a donor-lead private company for "efficient redistribution". Someone will get 100x, just not you. Our entire system of governance is revealing itself to be deeply flawed if corrupt leaders are tasked with crisis management. We need changes in both governance as well as preparation.
Price is a good method of discriminating between who wants something and who needs something. But just try and raise prices during a pandemic and there will be 1) laws and 2) calls of "price gouging".
If The Event really happened I bet that any transformers would be taken by the state/feds within 24 hours. And such an action would have the support of 99% of the populace.
Of course they would pay you. But it would be at 1x your cost, not a nickel higher.
PPE suppliers accused of 'blatant profiteering' as prices inflated by up to 825 per cent.
Cost of PPE soars due to price gouging, surge in demand ...
Protective equipment costs increase over 1000% amid ...
There are indeed some headlines of investigations regarding price gouging in such matters. But it appears that high prices are being paid. And with lots of outrageous stories of millions being paid and the product never showing up, I'd feel relatively safe charging some sane multiplier as long as the product actually exists.
The entire US nation needs 30 HV transformers in total and there is essentially no competition for those resources within the US, leading to an extremely illiquid market based upon a good that cannot be easily moved and can be easily seized with force.
PPE demand is measured in millions per day, is a resource in high demand by both nation and non-nation entities, and cannot as easily be seized by force as each unit item is the size of a dollar bill (and shipments can be protected, etc).
The federal government can and does come in, commandeer any goods needed on a NATSEC basis, They will pay the better of the list price or the most favored contract price. Take the goods, cut a check on the spot. Your other customers can and will wait. Period.
So, you would need to establish solid pricing history for your stockpile.
(source: worked with a mil commander who had been peripherally involved with an event where they snagged ~100 very backordered top end Sun workstations off the shipping floor. also currently work on DOD projects)
What you are reading is likely commercial transactions. You should also note that some of those vendors have been snd will be busted by the FBI for price gouging. E.g., one guy in Brooklyn got busted with truckloads of N95 masks & PPE, they just arrested him, logged the gear & donated it.
Your multiple needs to be very sane, or you are relying only on luck - they like to make examples of that kind of of behavior...
The only reason suppliers can get away with profiteering and price gouging is that ultimately, most of them aren't based in the USA and so there's no way for the US federal government to get their goods without either paying the price they demand or starting a war.
I'm suddenly tempted to write a not-quite-serious novel about a time period up to and including a post-apocalyptic dystopia that occurred simply because almost all emergency measures in the world were replaced by insurance policies.
In the end people subsist on irradiated rats and mutant vegetables but they're doing great because each of them are owed millions of pounds by Lloyd's of London which may or may not exist anymore.
Hands up who anticipated SARS-CoVid-2 -> covid-19? ... OK who mitigated it with a fortuitous insurance policy? ... OK who simply happened to have enough cash in the bank by accident?
Somewhat amazingly the US government anticipated a COVID-19 type pandemic, and even prepared for it.
Unfortunately a number of different failures of government resulted in that preparation being completely squandered. Leaving the US completely unprepared when it actually happened.
Some states like CA were prepared, but the federal government can’t leave these things for states to fend for themselves. At some point somebody somewhere will try to save a few million to make a budget match. Federal government burned 10 times that amount, probably the same day, on military
By what definition of the word was CA "prepared"? There was an improved pandemic infrastructure provided under Schwarzenegger, but that was completely gutted by Brown and left there by Newsom.
my wording was terse, but I quote the same story as the point you are making (the la times link). my point was that CA did what it could, given budget constraint. If federal had bailed out CA with that little money to keep the stockpile maintained, we would have been in much better shape nationwide.
CA has a stockpile that was allowed to deteoriate due to budget cuts. So the initial impression was that we weren't prepared, but then we reassessed the situation and gave away at least 500 ventilators to other states as we felt more confident.
Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1.
You can see that in the Santa Clara dashboard, which never showed an emergency situation:
> Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1.
Ummn, what? This sounds like an entirely made up factoid, and certainly isn't supported by the dashboard. The estimates of how many people in a population have to have had COVID-19 are very high. Even if you buy the Stanford study, which is itself controversial, the estimated numbers for how many have been exposed to the virus are still an order of magnitude below what you'd need for herd immunity.
It’s not just the Stanford study: antibody studies everywhere, from New York to Sweden to Italy are showing similar results.
The “criticism” on those studies are more hypothetical and not universal. It’s like “this study could be wrong because X”, and “that study could be wrong because Y”, but there are more than enough now to draw statistical conclusions.
The difference between 20% (NYC antibody positives) and herd immunity estimates (75%) is not an order of magnitude.
No, we don’t have herd immunity, but enough that the rate of infection is slowing.
And actually, at this rate we’ll get to herd immunity before a vaccine is found. Maybe the lockdown breakers are ironically the ones that (1) saves the economy (2) ends the corona pandemic.
OK right. Let's look at that NY data. If you figure you need 75% to get herd immunity, and we have 20% in NY, we need 3.35x the current number of infections to get herd immunity. Of course there is also overshoot but let's forget about that.
24,708 people have died in NY so far, but we'd need 82775 to die to get herd immunity. That's about 1% of NYC's population. Of course, NYC's population is a lot less since so many people left the city as this was getting started, and it also takes a while for many hospitalized people to lose their fight with this disease, so the 24,708 is an undercount. It also undercounts excess mortality.
Still, if we neglect all of that, you're looking at 3 million Americans dead in order for your strategy to work.
After we sacrifice the 3 million, we don't even know what the immunity will look like. Our experiences with other coronaviruses are not all that promising. People may be reinfected within months.
I don't know about results beyond the Stanford study, but they were talking about 4-5% as a highest estimate of those who had had it, which is indeed an order of magnitude off.
The NYC study is interesting; of course, it's a random sample of people at grocery stores and community centers i.e. "those who are out and about in a pandemic", not a truly random sample. But it's intriguing nonetheless.
Still, I'm not sure what the course of action that it supposedly suggests is: make everywhere in the USA 3x as infected as NYC at its peak? That's 40K more dead there and I doubt that the extrapolation to the rest of the country would be fun.
I'm not sure the criticism is just "hypothetical." My roommate just received an antibody test and was told by the provider that the error bars are so wide on positive results that it's basically only useful to confirm that you haven't had it. Maybe they're just hedging, and sure that's anecdotal, but I think we need more evidence before drawing a strong conclusion. I hope you're right.
From what I've read, the false positive rate on most of the antibody tests available in the US is high enough that you'd be just as well served by flipping a coin.
> No, we don’t have herd immunity, but enough that the rate of infection is slowing.
The rate of infection is slowing because of shelter-in-place orders. Suggesting we're to the point of developing herd immunity is completely baseless and improbable.
> In testimony before a Congressional Committee, it has been asserted that a prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population.
This could happen at any time due to a solar flare. The coronavirus has made it pretty clear that America is completely unprepared for any sort of major deviation from "normal".
That 90% number seems really hard to believe. Additionally, from the referenced article:
> There is no published model disclosing how these numbers were arrived at, nor are we able to validate a primary source for this claim. Testimony given by the Chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, while expressing similar concerns, gave no estimate of the deaths that would accrue from a prolonged nationwide grid collapse.
I'm highly suspicious that that number is exaggerated in order to inspire action on what still seems like a worthwhile issue.
Unfortunately discussion in this thread will be dead before anybody will finish comprehensively reading that report.
With the recent failure of the federal government during what should be a significantly easier to manage emergency, I find the 90% to be more believable than I would have just a year ago.
As context, I spent three years driving right around Africa, and before that two years driving from Alaska to Argentina. I've seen my fair share of collapsing infrastructure (Congo... Mali... Sudan, etc.) and what happens in just a few days without electricity.
In less developed countries the impacts are actually much less than they will be in our developed countries, because the people there are used to things failing, and their lives go on regardless. i.e. many people have beasts of burden to carry loads and farm, they have bicycles or walk to get around and they grow their own food.
For us, it won't be so easy.
- Very quickly all the perishables in the stores go bad, and food shortages become very real very fast.
- ATMs don't work - therefore no cash for anyone.
- Gas and diesel are very hard to get out of underground tanks without electricity (yes, you can hand pump it or use a generator... but how many of those are sitting around ready to go?)
- Communications go down - no cell phones, no internet, no radio, no TV. It's extremely hard to get accurate information in that scenario.
- Soon everyone is just focused on survival, so many other basics fall by the wayside. Garbage collection. Sewage, drinking water, medical supplies and much more all stop working.
- In places with low population density and where people have some "homesteading" skills this might not be so bad - they can just shoot a cow once every few weeks or whatever. In downtown LA, NYC and Chicago, it's extremely bad.
In just a few weeks you have mass hysteria, and things go downhill fast. Just look at the scenes in the big box stores when COVID-19 hit of people getting violent and stockpiling toilet paper. Now imagine how desperate everyone would be if the power was out, and in all likelihood will be out for months.
I'm from a 'prime' first-world country, The Netherlands, but I grew up in a developing nation where not having power or running water for hours was a daily thing, and not having either for days would happen with some regularity. Also the whole place was 90% percent corruption and 10% stale-mate level bureaucracy (to the point where my squeaky parents were forced to participate in the bribing at times).
As a teen, back in my fancy country, there was a highly unusual power outage in my country, in summer (which is really nothing extreme over here). Nonetheless, it caused chaos. offices had to be closed because there was no air conditioning and office windows couldn't be opened, trains had issues, people panicked, etc. I remember even back then thinking that if shit would ever properly hit the fan, I'd head to a place where at least the populace wouldn't panic. It's a societal panic and chaos that I fear more than having no power or water, or a 'proper' rule of law. Broadly speaking.
Not to me. The real number could be even higher, at least for the USA population.
Without electricity, here are just a few things that come to mind:
1) no water to your house. Have fun drinking out of the nearest river. There won't be a hospital you can go to when you get cholera or dysentery or heavy metal poisoning.
2) have fun using a chain saw (you do have one?) to chop down nearby trees so you can cook your food. How many cans of spam do you have right now in your pantry?
3) One tank of gasoline. The one in your car. That's it. Gas stations can't pump out of their tanks. It wouldn't be hard to get the 10,000 or 20,000 gallons out of their storage tanks by portable pumps. It's a day or two worth of gas. Many stations get daily gas deliveries, they don't have much inventory around.
4) No electricity means refineries can't operate. No diesel for trucks to deliver the gasoline that refineries can't produce. How many refineries can operate for long, if at all, without external electricity?
5) A lot of oil and gasoline moves by pipelines. These need significant energy for pumping along the way. No electricity, no pipelines.
6) No food being shipped from farms. No energy for factories to process it, e.g. refine grain and slaughter cattle.
7) How long can diesel-electric trains run with the diesel they have on hand? A few weeks? Of course, subways and overhead-electric trains would be totally non-functional.
8) Have fun in urban areas like NYC. I can't imagine what a place like that would be after a week or two without water or power and without working sewage.
I'll just stop right there. I could probably come up with another 100 things without really trying.
On the bright side, who will be OK:
1) A lot of the third world. People whose daily existence depends on subsistence farming can survive for years. Many of them don't have electricity right now.
2) Some farmers in the USA. They probably have hand-pumped wells (a relic from bygone days) and plenty of food on hand.
3) Some groups like the Mormons. They (at least on paper) prepare for those kinds of things.
4) People like the Amish. They would probably do OK.
5) Survivalists in general. They have stocked up on food, and they have guns. They will be happy to shoot you dead if you come to them to take their food. And if they run out of food they will be happy to go looking for you and shoot you dead and take your food.
Just 150 years ago none of this would have been an issue. We didn't have electricity and we had much lower population density.
But now, if we lose electricity nationwide for an extended period of time, we are way beyond fucked. We're mostly dead.
I can understand your negative perception on such situations but do you honestly believe that wind mills will come to a screeching halt with such outage? No, I’m not implying that they will power the entire nation but I have a hard time believing that those small sunsets of folks will also not have power.
The vast majority of electrical generation equipment, which is to say virtually all of it, is designed to either shut down or isolate from the grid when a disruption of electrical grid frequency is detected. This is to protect both the equipment and the grid, in the case of mechanical generators and even some solid-state generators connection to a significantly off-frequency grid (e.g. due to severe load imbalance due to loss of interconnection) will cause physical damage to the generators and possibly to transmission equipment.
So yes, windmills will come to a halt because they are designed to. Or, more specifically, they will feather their blades and continue to rotate idly while not producing power in order to ensure adequate hub lubrication.
There is a significant concern that, even in a scenario where all power plants are undamaged, it would take a significant period of time for plant operators and distribution system operators to restore service due to the need to more or less restart everything. Something very similar happened during the California power crisis and the great Northeast blackout, in which undamaged power plants were offline for an extended period of time due to the difficulty of restoring grid condition to normal.
Even under normal conditions of a stable grid, when power plants start (e.g. due to expected increase in demand) it takes hours from startup to connection to the grid. Most renewable generation methods (except hydro) and the newest natural-gas turbine plants can start much more quickly (e.g. 15 minutes), but this assumes that they will be connected to a grid which is operating at their design frequency, which would be very difficult to achieve if there has been a significant loss of generation.
And just to worry a bit more, a significant amount of electrical generation, especially in plants capable of load following (quick response to demand), is via natural gas. Natural gas distribution also relies heavily on compressor stations which run on, well, electricity. These stations have backup power capability but recent experience in the Southwest, during the 2011 winter, shows that this is not entirely reliable, and that severe events can disrupt the natural gas supply as well.
In BC ive heard of natural gas compressor stations have a natural gas turbine generator to run its own electric motor compressor. If it is connected to the functioning grid they can choose whether they Buy or sell electricity
Most commercial windmills would come to a screeching halt. That's because they feed into the grid. They're designed to feed into a fully functional, working grid. If the grid is broken then having random power inputs into it won't work. There would be no way to control the grid under that scenario.
Windmills that e.g. farmers and other rural people install on their property would probably be OK. It should be easy to disconnect them from the grid and have them power local equipment. But without some sort of energy storage, it would be dangerous to try to operate on just windmill power. Too variable. Most equipment wouldn't deal with it very well.
But there is one other strong positive I forgot to mention. PV power. That's becoming more and more available. Such a massive change in just the last few years.
PV would let pockets of people do well. Also, having something like a Tesla car or Powerwall, coupled with rooftop PV, would be a game changer for those people. A setup like that could do pretty well if decoupled from the external power grid.
> The coronavirus has made it pretty clear that America is completely unprepared for any sort of major deviation from "normal".
This is the nature of the US system of competitive federalism. States only coordinate with the federal government when either (a) it's politically expedient, because the ruling party in the same for both at that time, or (b) the federal government forces this issue, at which time lawsuits ensue.
It's helpful to think of the US as more a series of regions that sometimes fall under a shifting umbrella government than an actual, single entity.
I don't understand how you have identified this as the problem. Sure, states haven't coordinated on lockdowns, testing, or mask purchasing. But it's not because they're struggling against the federal government, it's because there's no official policy to coordinate with.
Seems to me like our main difficulty deviating from normal is the fact that a 20% decrease in demand kills off 10% of businesses within weeks and causes 20% of people to instantly get behind on their rent. There's no slack in the system.
“The National Guard and the State Police are both guarding these tests at an undisclosed location [because] the federal government seems to be interrupting supplies that are being sent elsewhere in the nation, and so I wanted to make sure that we received what we ordered,” [Illinois Gov. J.B.] Pritzker told reporters at an April 15 press conference.
"... the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week." [Emphasis added]
I meant that aside from the conflict over PPE - which has happened more than once - I am not aware of instances of the state and federal government working against one another.
States are reacting to confiscations which have already happened. See Massachusetts' first order of medical supplies of China.
Second order was flow in on a private jet protected by the Massachusetts National Guard.
No one knows what happens to the supplies after seizure. There are reports that some get resold by private Trump-affiliated companies. Government claims to be redistributing them to those most in need. There are no audit trails. It's a mess.
Of course there's a chance. It's possible that Trump is correct and there is a vast conspiracy to make him look bad when in fact he is exactly what he says he is: a very stable genius who is doing a great job.
There's also a chance that the earth is flat. I'll give comparable odds for both.
Actually, there are two interstate pacts doing just that, coordinating their covid-19 response because they think the federal government is useless.
There's the Western States Pact (CA, OR, WA, NV, CO), and NY just announced an eastern states consortium (NY, NJ, MA, CT, PA, RI, DE).
Add to the fact that several states have had to take drastic measures like calling in their national guard to protect their own PPE shipments from being seized by federal agents, and it's hard not to argue that several states are in fact struggling against the federal government in a completely unprecedented way.
This is how things are supposed to work. The federal government is give very specific enumerated powers per the constitution. The founder are would be appalled by the size and scope of the federal government. One thing they did not account for was lack of loyalty people have towards their own state.
The state militias are for stopping possible encroachments by the federal government. No the feds should not be seizing stuff. The state are supposed to check the fed, and the people check the state.
The federal government has been actively confiscating PPE shipments and doing who-knows-what with them. There were multiple stories about this, though they didn't grab many headlines. It's not even just competition, it's more like federal spite, with focus on blue states.
It’s more nuanced than that. As Gov Pritzker made public, states are having to bid against one another for PPE and driving up prices significantly because it’s every man (or woman) for themselves. He publicly castigated the federal government for not centralizing the acquisition of resources (which isn’t the same as footing the bill as they can allocate the materials (acquired at whatever better cost they can negotiate as a single buyer then) to states based off of population or need, ands charge them for them if they like.
If the feds did centralize acquisition and distribution all hell would break loose. Every allocation would be disputed and every allocation would be blamed on partisan allegiances.
The solution would be the states deciding among themselves who should get what, with the richer states being OK with getting less than they would otherwise get.
It's pretty interesting that most countries in Europe are unitary states while most countries in the Americas are federal states. Maybe due to the centuries of warfare in Europe the states that survived were unitary states that could better handle external threats. Or maybe it's a holdover from a tradition of monarchy that the Americas never had.
Interestingly, Germany is also a federal state. Yet we never seem to hear about federal regions of Germany disagreeing with each other and fighting with the Federal government like we hear about the US. Any Germans want to spill the tea on German inter-regional political drama?
> most countries in the Americas are federal states
This ain't true¹. Most of the landmass of the Americas is covered by federated states, sure, but the vast majority of states are unitary.
The more relevant factor is the size of the state's territory. With a few exceptions (like China), most big countries are federated, and most small countries are unitary.
Good point, I was using that map when I made my observation and overlooked the cluster of smaller countries in the Andes. My bad.
After doing some back of the envelope calculations, about 17% of the countries in the Americas are federated and 16% in Europe, so it's actually pretty similar. But countries in the Americas have a much bigger size disparity than in Europe which really makes the federated areas stand out.
It can be argued that this it is part of the American political character because our origin story was shaped by the combination of disparate states, as in, we could have easily had colonies that sided with the British.
It got cemented due to Slavery as we basically carved up the country between slaves states and free states, and ultimately fought a civil war to deal with this bifurcation.
It’s been our long history, it defined us.
Edit: Whoops, I did the American thing again and forgot there are other countries in the Americas.
To expand on it: I can't really compare the magnitude, because I don't have a good sense for how much of an issue it is in the US, but yes, states do sometimes disagree with each other, have differing interests depending on local factors, want funding allocated to their projects, and they do occasionally squabble with the federal government over authority (especially when they want federal funding for things that are their area of responsibility). They also have quite an effect on how politics inside and between the political parties work (which I feel like in other countries the largest cities do instead?)
Well, Germany when it first emerged as a nation state as Imperial Germany in 1871 did so as a federal state. Quite different from the UK or France. Even Italy, which emerged as a nation state in 1861, did so as a unitary kingdom. Germany's federal form of government seems to go against the trend in Europe.
A hint as to the US federal infighting is that very few other countries have statues to the side that lost the civil war. Or other similarly traumatic wars; the Communist countries have demolished their statues of Lenin or herded them into museums, even Spain has removed its last statue of the dictator Franco.
(Not to say that you can't see the faultlines in other European societies though. Ireland's parties inherit from her civil war. The UK has not entirely given up on anti-Catholicism, and has forgotten that its own most recent civil war only ended in 1998. I would put money on East vs West still being somewhat live in German politics, but conducted with a good deal more dignity)
This could happen at any time due to a solar flare.
Actually, no. If you want to read what happens in such an event, see section 3.8.2 of the PJM Emergency Procedures Manual.[1] You get DC current to ground in AC transformers, which results in saturation of the magnetic elements and transformer heating. It's a heat problem; it has to be dealt with in minutes, not milliseconds.
That document is addressed to the people in the grid control room. There used to be a training course on line which explained this in simpler terms.
> I’d like to ask you guys whether we are prepared for other black swans. Let’s start with a collapse of the electrical system due to solar flares or electromagnetic pulse attacks.
A Black Swan is a "high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare event that is beyond the realm of normal expectations". But we know that the Carrington Event happened in 1859, and that it's only a matter of time before a big solar flare will affect Earth in the same way. So this is not a Black Swan.
But yes, we should prepare for foreseeable rare events.
Events like the Carrington & Covid seem to fit: high profile, hard to predict and rare. IMO, both qualify as Black swan.
At some point, you have to pick a threshold on the probabilities involved... These events are likely independent & identically distributed (i.e. hard to predict for any year), and I'd call sub-1% annual chance pretty rare.
But I'm receptive to a different threshold... But you can't just say "Black swan only counts for previously-inconceivable events".
Edit: I'm assuming covid-19 is structurally different than Sars, mers, Ebola, & H1N1 purely based on the global effect it has had to date. If you found those others as pandemics (not according to WHO though), then you can remove it as Black swan.
It's not a black swan because everyone with half a brain could say that there would eventually be a global pandemic respiratory disease. H1N1 was technically one, it just happened to be mild. We thought there was going to be one in 1976 and raced to vaccinate everyone against it. These things happen, like earthquakes. Nobody knows when, but if the San Andreas went tomorrow it wouldn't be a black swan.
Are any black swans going to be black swans in hindsight?
Did anyone anticipate it enough to put their money where their mouth was? A fortune, and a major service to humanity, could have been made by a private individuals stockpiling PPE in vast quantities.
You say anyone with half a brain anticipated it. I didn't. Did you buy 500k N95 masks and put them in a warehouse?
Knowing someone will happen is easy. I know for sure that a large meatorite will hit the earth and cause mass deaths and crop failure, but I have no idea in how many 100s, 1000s or millions of year it will happen. If it happens tomorrow it would be a black Swan *
* an example only, we would get plenty of advanced warning.
> Did anyone anticipate it enough to put their money where their mouth was? A fortune, and a major service to humanity, could have been made by a private individuals stockpiling PPE in vast quantities.
The response to this pandemic has actually worried me quite a lot on this front, because it seems likely now that anyone who stockpiled PPE at pre-pandemic prices and tries to resell during the pandemic at a price high enough to justify their initial investment will be accused of price gouging and possibly have their stockpile seized.
Which has the effect that nobody has an incentive to build a reserve of things that will be useful in a future crisis, even if that crisis is foreseeable.
So yeah, it's easy enough to say "I think there's at least a 5% chance per year of an event which results in at least 10 million people who will want to buy a portable generator" (which is 10x the amount normally sold in a year). I genuinely do think that's a true statement, and it would imply that the number of generators currently being produced would need to be at least 50% higher to meet demand averaged across all times rather than typical times, which is a pretty big difference in a pretty big market. Normally when you think you know something the market doesn't, you can bet against the market by investing in whatever the market is undervaluing, and if you're right you make money. In this case, I'm not sure how you would go about doing that. Investing in companies making generators doesn't increase production. Buying generators and leaving them in a warehouse risks your stockpile being seized in the case where you were right about the risk. I'm honestly not sure how I would go about putting my money where my mouth is here.
Even without the prospect of seizure, it's not free to maintain a stockpile, or maintain a short. So you're also making a bet that it will happen sooner rather than later- if it takes 100 years, your equipment will be rusted or obsolete and you'll probably be dead by then. And you'll have paid every year to maintain it, money you could have put into a slightly less risky and more liquid investment that would have long since paid out.
All the day-to-day costs and risks can just totally swamp the potential upside, even before the regulatory risk of seizure or being forced to sell your stockpile at pre-crisis prices. Price-gouging laws are already on the books, so it's not like it would be that much of a surprise.
The first one that comes to mind is the arrival of the Conquistadors, from the point of view of the locals. Even in retrospect, could they have any reason to believe it was possible? Well, not really, no. Invasion generally, maybe, but not from another hemisphere.
It has to be something that's just not accounted for in your worldview, something you couldn't expect based on anything you know about. A meteorite wouldn't be a black swan for us, but I think it would be for a society that hadn't discovered them yet. A meteorite strike on London circa 1800 would have been a black swan, because at the time people (Europeans, anyway) thought that shooting stars were atmospheric phenomena. Large rocks falling from the sky just wasn't in their cosmology.
Everyone knows that the stock market will eventually drop a lot, due to some crisis or other. It will happen, to a near certainty. But the cost of maintaining a short position long term will exceed the payout, that's why it's really hard to make money off short selling. Otherwise it would be free money every decade or so.
Stockpiling costs money, and it costs more money the longer it takes for your bet to pay out, just like a short. Masks expire, rubber perishes. You have to bet on the timing, not just that it will eventually happen. A 100-year event will take 100 years to pay out on average, so how much money can you afford to lock away in anticipation of something that might not happen in your lifetime? The opportunity cost isn't zero.
I can understand his frustration with our lack of preparation, but he's used the term black swan to describe economic recessions that were also predicted by many people.
Wikipedia says Taleb gives three criteria for black swan phenomena:
1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
3. The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.
Given these criteria, how could a San Andreas earthquake NOT be a black swan? (And by "San Andreas earthquake" I mean The Big One, not one of the many smaller tremors that occur all the time.) Because we know that, one day, The Big One will eventually occur? Or because we can prepare for it to some degree (though I'd argue there are magnitudes that The Big One could hit that even the most earthquake safe of buildings aren't prepared to endure in CA).
By your logic, I literally cannot think of a single candidate for a Black Swan event.
I've seen examples floated: World Wars, Rise of PCs or Internet, Chernobyl, September 11th, etc, etc. All of these possibilities were posited by smart people well in advance -- again, it's a matter of setting thresholds on the probabilities.
> These events are likely independent & identically distributed (i.e. hard to predict for any year), and I'd call sub-1% annual chance pretty rare.
Put another way, it seems reasonable to me that "no one alive has experienced it before (and probably not their parents either)" is a decent threshold.
Maybe someone who knows a bunch about this stuff can enlighten me. I was kind of under the impression that a large solar flare would damage _all sorts_ of electronic equipment, by inducing currents wires all over the place.
- If we had extra transformers on hand, how would you protect them from also being damaged?
- If a solar flare is powerful enough to damage these transformers, would it also have damaged a large proportion of devices that use power? I.e. even if you could get the electric grid working, would there be working systems of any complexity to use the power?
It is true that the solar flare will induce current in any exposed wire. However the following factors increase the current. The length of the wire, the thicker the wire, how poorly insulated it is, and the stronger the magnetic surges caused by the flare.
Long distance transmission lines are very long, fairly thick, and very exposed. The result is that the surges that they experience are several orders of magnitude stronger than, say, inside of your washing machine or a transformer unconnected to the wire. That surge doesn't hurt the wire, but it can blow the transformer when it hits it.
And hence the problem is mostly in blown transformers. If you have other transformers on hand, you swap them in and most of the system should be up.
I can see a couple of rather obvious problem with this. The electrical grid is, well, connected - the long, high-voltage sections are connected to the lower voltage sections which are connected to the even lower voltage sections. Those connections are through transformers, but if the surge is big enough to destroy even the largest transformers what's to stop it from blowing through all of the transformers and frying the delicate low-voltage control electronics of every grid connected device, including ones critical to operating the grid and power plants? Also, smaller devices are naturally going to be a lot more sensitive than huge transformers, so even if they don't experience the same level of voltage and current this could still be enough to destroy them.
A bit more self-centered, is there a way to protect consumer devices from something this? I'm primarily thinking external hard drives with pictures/video we wouldn't want to lose. Maybe a faraday-cage-box of some sort we could buy to just store a spare external in?
Your external hard drive that's disconnected from anything else should be OK. If there's a solar storm strong enough to fry that, you will have far far greater problems. Like whether you live or die. Caring about pictures and videos will be way way down on your list or priorities.
Transformers are usually housed in metal boxes. Any wires inside metal sheeting of whatever geometry would be protected because any current induced would be induced in the metal container which dissipates the power of the pulse. To learn more read about Faraday cages.
True, a transformer sitting in the middle of a warehouse is pretty safe. Unfortunately most of them actually in use have these huge current-carrying electrical wires running right that "faraday cage"...
Did this guy even talk to a power grid engineer before posting his opinion? Offline spares of long lead time equipment are always kept by utilities. The risk to the power grid is institutional knowledge, if something happens to the small group of greybeards who run each regional utility, they could bring in new qualified engineers but it would take time to understand the system (which would cause an outage that either wouldn't happen in the first place or would be short to become protracted). The other major risk is if they are kept from doing their jobs due to budget or political issues (see: PG&E)
The main issue is that ultra high voltage transformers are large, expensive, have long lead times (12-36 months!), and are built almost entirely in China.
You're correct though, that the entire energy industry skews old and is at risk of losing a lot of knowledge as talent retires.
The real risk is squirrels and trees though. Flora and fauna do not play well with transmission equipment.
> Did this guy even talk to a power grid engineer before posting his opinion?
Seems like no? haha. To his credit, he admits he is not an expert and asks us to tell him why he is wrong. Unfortunately, when I read the comments, it seems like none of his blog readers are experts on the subject, either. So, maybe not "Monday Morning Quarterbacking," but certainly Armchair Quarterbacking.
I don't think it's true that the US is unprepared. Most major grids have documented procedure to do a blackstart.
Which would be painful as hell but hardly 90% of population dies level painful. Author seems to be assuming more widespread damage I guess. In which case a handful of HV transformers aren't like to be the biggest headache. I'd imagine there is a hell of a lot more sensitive equipment out there than HV transformers. Internet, stock market, comms etc.
This article is underestimating also how creative can people can become under stressful situations.
For example, converting car engines as power generators, fixing these High voltage transformers, etc.
People adapt, they will build power generators based on whatever they find, industries will shift to make photovoltaic panels and electric production will become local, etc.
Yes it's 90% of people dying if there is no electricity and everybody stays home waiting to die.
1 billion people in the world live without electricity.
The solar flares are a minor risk compared to the main actual risk (war or sabotage), if there is a war, no matter how many High voltage transformers you have in stock, they are going to be destroyed.
I feel like 2008 was an era of irresponsibility. Home buyers took out risky loans, banks sold these loans without accepting responsibility for how risky they where, investors purchased these loans without taking the responsibility to even see what kind of Loans where even in these mortgage backed securities. Ratings agencies abdicated this responsibility too. Goldman lied to AIG, and AIG didn't do the research to understand the credit default swaps they where selling. Central banks didn't accept responsibility for anything, saying "it was impossible to see the crisis coming".
It doesn't appear that we have left this paradigm at all. The only group that has improved is the consumers, households have significantly cut back leverage since the 2008 crisis. But companies have not. Companies don't feel they have any responsibilities to prepare for these long tail situations, and governments don't seem capable of doing it. leaving it to central banks to throw trillions at the problem after the fact.
I would argue that the 10 years after 08' have also lacked responsibility.
I think the secondary effects of the covid shutdown are going to highlight some very poor decisions. Mainly rallying the economy, rather than making it more robust. I'm interested in seeing what happens with housing specifically.
thats basically my point, Companies still aren't taking responsibility for anything and are running the companies to keep the share price up so the Exec team can collect on their options in 4 years and move on. Similarly the government seems completely incompetent, and willfully blind to the risks being taken.
I think it’s in our interest to have some kind of political Readiness Act that assesses events like this (Pandemic being in the list, along with this). Spending a few billion on it is pennies compared 2 trillion that we thus far have spent, not including the widespread economic cost.
Now that we've got "global pandemic" marked off our bingo card, I'd put this at the top of the most likely "unforeseen" worldwide disasters. Some kind of supervolcano eruption is the other candidate.
Of course, not all disasters are global and every country or region will have its own rare disasters to prepare for.
It would have to be a lot bigger than "a nuclear warhead" to cause a global catastrophe rather than a local one, and it has to be more unfortunately aimed than just coming down over land. It would be pretty bad if the Chelyabinsk meteor had hit Tokyo or Mexico City, but as it happened it troubled glaziers more than doctors.
The solar flare risk (at ~1% per year [1]) seems much more likely than many of the other items there. Supervolcanos, pandemics, war, and AI also seem like salient risks, but we probably shouldn't worry about e.g. gamma ray bursts or asteroids.
How likely is simultaneous failure of 9 out of 30 of them? Totally unlikely if you ask me. And some redundancy is built into the system, so it's not like failure of 3 will cause loss of power in 1/3 of the U.S. - most likely none at all (or maybe only scheduled blackouts in peak times in some of the places).
In Cyprus, we had such an event in 2011, when 2000 tons of explosives Russian tried to smuggle into Syria, were intercepted by a U.S. Navy and redirected to be offloaded here (because the ship carrying them was formally registered here and flew a Cyprus flag - really being owned by the KGB), and these explosives went off in the summer heat, wrecking a power station that produced 70% of the electricity here.
We only had about 2 hours of blackout per day and a recommendation to limit a/c use, for about a month.
Power transmission is super resilient and relay protection is a whole science of it's own. Especially in the U.S. when there are many virtually independent, privately owned and loosely interconnected transmission systems, which puts it at a relative advantage.
> how likely is simultaneous failure of 9 out of 30 of them? Totally unlikely if you ask me.
It's quite possible because their failure probabilities aren't independent. A geomagnetic storm could take most of them out at once. Like respiratory pandemics, this is an event that happens every ~century.
But it will be known well in advance and can be mitigated by simply shutting the grid down for a few hours. Only places which will experience difficulties are those having a large fraction of nuclear power since a reactor can't be quickly restarted once shut down, so power will restore only in some days.
Do you have a cite? My impression was that we do not have sufficient preparations in place to do this.
(E.g., we may have satellites that can be taken as weak indicators, but they are not designed for this, and there is no clear decision authority starting from possibly ambiguous satellite data to prophylactically shutting down power for 300M people against their will. Hopefully, recent events have made clear that "leaders will get their act together and act decisively during an emergency" cannot be the default assumption.)
If it were as easy as spending $300M, every utility company in the country would be falling over themselves to do it. Utility companies make their money by rate basing their capital expenditures. The rate you pay for electricity is set by the state, to guarantee a certain ROI for the utility on approved infrastructure. Utilities literally spend money to make money.
I couldn't agree more that our electric grid needs more investment. I won't pretend to know better than the PUCs and the utilities about how that should be spent or what should be passed on to the ratepayer. The only thing I do know is that my company (Kevala) has mapped tens of thousands of substations, transmission lines, and HV transformers, so it seems we would have a lot more to back up than those 30. Good time for non-wires alternatives?
It's a very complex topic. But clearly any country heavily invested in and reliant on technology must include a significant fraction of tech/science literate leaders ... an actual requirement for (half of?) any state's Congress-critters.
To whatever extent 'terrorism' is a real threat (and not just an excuse to maintain the military budget), many other dangers like pandemics and an EMP event and climate change were outlined decades ago. F-35s and aircraft carriers and hundreds of military bases won't cut it against them. Nor will faith.
The movement to run the government as a business is at the heart of a lot of these problems.
Governments have a different risk model than a for profit business.
For profit businessEs can’t in any way financially justify to it’s stock holders the spending of money to protect against something that might never happen.
I ran DR & BC for a very large global firm, I reported to the Board, and I can tell you these people thought I was insane, even to protect against things like fires.
“When was the last time you heard of a large office building having a major fire with more than a couple of casualties?” This was actually said to me when I was proposing to improve the company’s fire protection system. I got out voted and they “ saved” the money. They still haven’t had a fire, so as far as they are concerned I was stupid.
Electric companies are necessary so they know if something does go horribly wrong they get bailed out.
I'll just drop this book recommendation here, which I found to be an interesting read during this pandemic:
Blackout: Tomorrow Will Be Too Late (2012)
Marc Elsberg
Being "prepared for black swans" is a bad idea. Of course, you want your system as a whole to be as antifragile as possible, but one should never prepare for black swans, but rather buy insurance (so to speak): hedge, diversify, minimize impact. For example, we can imagine a world where some other pandemic is being spread. One that, instead of attacking the lungs, attacks the kidneys. All of a sudden we'd need dialysis machines -- not ventilators. See how preparing for some specific black swan is misguided (as we can be hit by any other, equally unlikely, black swan event)?
> In testimony before a Congressional Committee, it has been asserted that a prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population.
Okay, this sounds like an interesting assertion. Can we back this up? Is this just alarmism? Where's the data?
> Yes, $300 million dollars for a stockpile of 30 HV transformers is far too expensive to prevent 90% of the public dying and the rest reduced to cannibalism.
I see. So now we're assuming some off-the-charts assertion, which is dubious at best[1], is absolutely true. The cannibalism is thrown in for extra flair. Gotta' get them clicks somehow.
> Update: I forget to mention that I’m far more worried about accidental nuclear war, bioterrorism and AI run amok than I am about solar flares.
Anyone that's seriously worried about "AI run amok" (whatever that means) doesn't understand the first thing about AI.
Investing a nominal amount in strategic backup equipment that you might never need is hedging.
An event that has a low probability of occurring but that (if it occurs) will be highly catastrophic is exactly the scenario that calls for hedging. Most critical systems have already diversified by building in redundancies (generators) and an insurance check wouldn’t be very useful for keeping the rest of us alive.
> an insurance check wouldn’t be very useful for keeping the rest of us alive
True. I meant "insurance" in the general sense (clarified my post). Insurance can be any number of things, as you mention, including hedging and diversification.
While I don't disagree that transformers... let alone key transformer.. are critical. By disabling 9 transformers you cannot take down “THE GRID”. You could certainly cause havoc and perhaps take down sections of a grid, perhaps a large one such as new york city. But these would be localized. While ensuring that critical components are local and available is important much of this is being done in the energy sector. It’s not to say there simply are no replacements. However, the energy sector, including transmission, is made up of over 6000 separate organizations. Most of which are not federally controlled or controlled by the local government. Put simply they are for-profit companies. They are critical infrastructure and regulated by the gov, but not a part of.
Put short, this is a serious matter, but not in the way it is presented here. It would be a herculean effort to take out 1 let alone the suggested 9. Especially in a coordinated fashion. EVEN IF it was achieved.. This would only cause localized issues. Not takedown. “THE GRID”
This is a much larger discussion but a few things to consider:
1. There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way. There are thousands of generation and transmission companies throughout the US. They all maintain there own “grids”. There is connectivity to provide ways to connect grids to sell/buy/shed power. But these connections are controlled and can be simply… disconnected.
2. Without going on a major diatribe on the many different attack vectors and inherent vulnerabilities in the energy sector…. Suffice to say.. The easiest and most sure way to take out a transformer is physical. They would need to be destroyed or disabled.
Digital/remote interference would require an immense effort and campaign… we are not talking breaching the 9 locations… we’re talking hacking millions upon millions of connected devices and coordinating load to take out a transformer or the grid as whole…. The coordination and effort necessary for either are staggering.
3. There are in fact spares and inventory… just not in the hands of the feds.
You seem to be assuming some sort of terrorist event. I would have thought the most likely reason for the whole grid to go down is another Carrington event.
I'm not assuming anything/anyone specifically but lean towards nation-state, anarchist, terror, etc.
A natural disaster such as a flare, earthquake, fire, etc. are a different story.
The radiation and electrical magnetic pulse from a solar flare could hamper equipment. However recent studies in the last few years by EPRI, INL, and ORNL actually show that much equipment would survive and equipment that did not would be localized.
Do we stress test our grid(s) core components with inputs that would be similar to that of a solar flare to write any of this off?
I feel like 5 months ago we’d be sitting here dismissing the notion that a face mask shortage is a trivial problem, all countries can just suddenly ramp up production. But we couldn’t.
There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way
This did not prevent "Northeast blackout of 2003" when bunch of states in the US and province of Ontario in Canada went without power for 3 days. I remember it quite clearly. Was not big fun. Luckily my friends and I with families went camping on the lake so did not really suffer other than some little disaster in a fridge ;)
The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region.
That was a cascading failure where the instability of part of the grid tripped protection systems intended to prevent damage to equipment throughout the rest. The individual regions making up that grid were perfectly capable of operating independently, possibly with reduced capacity, even after the blackout. What they couldn't do is remain operational whilst unexpectedly being cut off, because that caused transient unbalances between generation and load. I'm pretty sure there's no failure of a small number of transformers that would leave the US as a whole, or any large chunk of it, without power for a prolonged period. There are probably scenarios where it could trigger a cascading failure where protection devices shut down the rest of the grid in order to protect the other equipment from imbalances caused by the failures, but that alone is not going to lead to 12-18 months of blackouts and the death of 90% of the US population.
In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I did not mention any party, that perennial misdirection to their collective heist. Also don't fall for the other smoke screen of small vs. big government. I demand at least a competent government.
For politicians truth is whatever you make people believe it to be.
Meanwhile engineers and scientists struggle daily to find the hard facts of the world to painstakingly build or discover something that improves lives. We should be disgusted and revolted at who is leading us right now. We should drive these fools out office and strip them of any respect.
If we don't, there will be no one competent left in position to rebuild from this, or the next, catastrophe that "nobody" could have expected. Or maybe there will be some states or localities that can get their act together, and the rest will be a wasteland of warring cultural and racial tribes.