A former academic supervisor mused it could be good for a society to see the return of diseases causing lifelong disfigurement and disability just to remind people to get vaccinated.
Personally I don't think it needs to go that far, and it's a situation entirely preventable.
Is there a term for when a problem has been solved for so long it falls out of living memory creating a natural breeding ground for people to question why the solution is even necessary, come up with nothing because the problem is so long gone, and invent conspiracy theories to fill the gap?
Nobody is scared of getting polio anymore and one person not getting vaccinated doesn't really change anything --> the fact that they're nonetheless making me get vaccinated must be because of government chips, lizardpeople, big pharma profits, etc etc.
More specific than Chesterton's fence or just history repeating itself.
Yes, though I expect there to be a European block, the US, and a Chinese block. Russia there as a wildcard. I doubt we see Germany in competition with Britain.
The trouble with thinking in terms of blocs is that they don't solve the foundational economic problem: who is the sin-eater who is trusted and willing to run the deficits so that everyone else can run surpluses? Without a clear answer, you just have the same question repeated within and between blocs, so the same beggar-thy-neighbor incentives that exist without blocs exist within and between blocs, so the fighting continues within and between blocs until the question is answered. Blocs don't solve the problem at all.
Russia firmly in that second tier along with better behaved peers that have brighter demographic futures and an actual economy, like India, Indonesia and Brazil.
The interwar era between WWI and WWII is most instructive for what a multipolar currency world looks like. The Pound Sterling still mostly worked before WWI and the Dollar rose in the wake of WWII.
The absence of a currency hegemon caused "Kindleberger problems," named after the economist who described them, and will cause them again. The big issue is that everyone wants to pump exports to pump their real economy, they can't all succeed because the world is a closed system, so they fight. First with tariffs, eventually with guns.
These Kindleberger Problems will get worse until the US gets its shit back together or China assumes the throne. Note that assuming the throne will destroy the export sector that they love so much (Triffin Dilemma), so not only are they not ready today, they don't even clearly want to be ready. Much like the US between WWI and WWII.
Buckle up, because the tariff wars, Great Depression, the economic driving force for the imperialism of Imperial Japan, and other awful things that you've heard of before all fall in the category of "Kindleberger Problems," are all downstream of not having a global currency hegemon, and are likely to rhyme with what comes next.
There's not that much they can do. It's often discussed that if the extreme August 1972 solar storm had overlapped with an Apollo mission (it didn't), it would have acutely sickened the astronauts.
> "Had a mission been taking place during August, those inside the Apollo command module would have been shielded from 90% of the incoming radiation. However, this reduced dose could still have caused acute radiation sickness if the astronauts were located outside the protective magnetic field of Earth, which was the case for much of a lunar mission. An astronaut engaged in EVA in orbit or on a moonwalk could have experienced severe radiation poisoning, or even absorbed a potentially lethal dose."
The Orion capsule's contingency plan looks something like this:
> "To protect themselves, astronauts will position themselves in the central part of the crew module largely reserved for storing items they’ll need during flight and create a shelter using the stowage bags on board. The method protects the crew by increasing mass directly surrounding them, and therefore making a denser environment that solar particles would have to travel through, while not adding mass to the crew module itself."
For All Mankind “illustrated” a solar storm at surface-level of the moon, including “boiling” regolith. I wonder how embellished this was, or whether particle bombardment would actually cause this.
My mind goes to the working mechanism of eidophor projectors, where oil on the projection bowl does indeed deform under electron beam exposure.
I sat down and worked it out. What do you know golden ratio.
Oh and this other number, -0.618. Anyone know what it's good for?
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