Saturday 5 April 2003

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Civ2. (Playing as the Americans, as you can guess. Much of the rest of the world is still rather murky.)

Global perspective

People still don't see. Even reasonably smart people follow the current like dead fish. They don't see that the world has changed. In so many ways.

The war against Iraq is just a petty squabble. It is insignificant, even should it go horribly wrong. If it succeeds (as seen from the US side) it is barely worth a footnote in history.

The US is falling from its pedestal. Just like no one saw the fall of Japan until 1990, so no one sees the fall of the US now. I am not sure how it could be more obvious. Economists are worried now because consumer confidence is slipping fast. They should have been worried when it rose in the 1990es. They should have been worried when families bought shares (directly or more often through mutual funds) that would never give them the money back if they just kept them, only if they found a greater fool to sell them to. They should have been worried when people kept borrowing and spending, borrowing and spending. When the recession began in the industry and people kept importing with no thought as to how they would ever pay back. They should have been worried as far back as when Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned about irrational exuberance in the stock market. He must have seen it back then. As did I. But it seems people are still not seeing it. Like a cartoon character who walks off the cliff and does not realize until he looks down.

***

While the world entertains itself with petty squabbles, we face a killer disease that could literally kill people off faster than we can bury them. (Or they can bury us, depending on which side you are on.) The mortality rate is now up to ca 5%, and ca 10% remain in serious or critical condition, meaning that some of them are likely to die too. Even if 90% of the population were never ever affected, both hospitals and undertakers would still be overwhelmed. In that case, we are talking about ca 1 million people in the USA alone. Compare this to ca 20-40 000 that die from the flu yearly. If it spreads to the entire population, the USA would lose ca 12 million lives (not counting those that die because there will no longer be any health care capacity for the routine stuff like diagnosing cancer in time or performing appendectomy). Most of these corpses would end up in ditches or on private pyres, as there quite literally is not nearly enough capacity for burial and cremation.

The good news is that 80% of those infected recover fully, and these people are full of antibodies. It is somewhat expensive to extract and purify those antibodies but preliminary trials look good. We can expect all politicians and millionaires to make it through the pandemic, no matter what happens to the rest of the populace.

Oh, and judging from similar events in the past, this could prove a great opportunity to get your own home cheaply. Quite a few nice homes will be standing empty.

I must admit that I feel a sense of futility when facing something of this proportion. But mostly when facing human stupidity, which stands before me like ... not a wall, no, like the sheer cliffside of an enormous mountain range. Insurmountable. Impassable. Impregnable.