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arjie 11 hours ago [-]
> the US has “abdicated its longstanding role as a leader in global health and humanitarian response.”
It’s interesting to note that in the end, there was no one else coming: we were it. A large amount of disease containment and control was just fronted by the United States. As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. It’s not that the Chinese century will have their massive industrial engine put to the tasks that America put hers to. It’s just that things won’t get done.
Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
hedora 11 hours ago [-]
I think you are reading the situation incorrectly. The US was previously the center of international collaboration for science and technology, and that took decades to establish.
The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.
The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?)
I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically:
1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left
2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
pjot 11 hours ago [-]
> The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.
Is this true? From years of watching Top Gear any Chinese car that was tested was laughably bad.
m-s-y 11 hours ago [-]
For EVs, yes, absolutely
somenameforme 10 hours ago [-]
Yip, outside the US BYD cars are absolutely everywhere, pretty awesome cars, and crazy cheap - like < $15k. Apparently < $10k within China itself.
ShinyLeftPad 10 hours ago [-]
The price is not the important part, it basically doesn't matter. On top of subsidies and government policy aiming to undermine manufacturing in EU and elsewhere, domestic consumption in PRC is laughably low and government policies act to transfer wealth from households to manufacturing. Locals won't buy the supply, PRC literally has to get these cars somewhere or trash them.
Now if those cars are actually good, price independent, then that would be worth mentioning.
dirtbagskier 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
CamperBob2 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm dating myself, but I remember when the same was said of Japanese cars.
First we laughed at them, then we fought them, then they won, then we solved the problem with protectionist tariffs.
epgui 10 hours ago [-]
> The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly
Uhhh no? How did they screw up? They were notified late, and then they did what they were supposed to do.
WarmWash 10 hours ago [-]
Trump is the populist candidate elected to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
His economic policy has way more overlap with Bernie's than people tend to understand. Both believe immigration lowers wages, and both believe tariffs are imperative (you have to dig back to pre-2017 talk from Bernie, he changed his website/talking points after Trump won).
Edit: People struggle so hard with politics because everyone is totally blinded by there side. Here are populist things Trump has done/trying to do
- remove taxes on tips
- implement tariffs on foreign goods
- implement strict immigration policy (note sanders wanted a pathway to citizenship, he did not want an open border, and he never addressed how he would handle millions showing up at the border)
- block corporate landlords from single family home ownership
- create a government funded college level education program to get free bachelor degrees.
- take government ownership stake in large American companies (us steel, intel)
- cap interest rates on credit cards
- lower central bank interest rates
- de-criminalizing drugs, reschedule marijuana
- pro crypto
- pro prediction markets
Guys, you can hate Trump, you can accurately access he isn't intelligent or competent, criticize his brutish approach, but if you cannot recognize he is a populist, you are objectively lost-in-the-sauce.
sarchertech 10 hours ago [-]
Whether you believe in immigration reform or that we need tariffs to protect domestic industries or not, Trump executed both in the absolute worst way possible. And destroying USAID, threatening to take Greenland by force, constantly threatening to pull out of NATO, abducting the leader of another country, and invading Iran with almost no preparation or planning were not things Bernie would have done.
Just specific to tariffs, if you are a US company that wants to setup domestic manufacturing you have no idea what the situation will be next week much less several years from now. The chaos isn’t good for anyone but Trump. The rule of law is as much about stability as it is freedom.
Groxx 10 hours ago [-]
I sorta doubt Bernie would've been causing the insane tariff chaos that Trump is constantly doing. How it's done matters immensely.
WarmWash 10 hours ago [-]
You are right, but competent populist or incompetent populist is still populist.
delfinom 10 hours ago [-]
And yet the economy outside the great AI bubble is continuing to slow down.
The rest of the world doesn't want our stuff. We make uncompetitive products.
My own megacorp is continuing to build mass manufacturing capacity in Europe, specifically because tariffs are causing hassles for US import and export, and our EU buyers are demanding EU made after the bull decided to destroy all diplomatic relations built the last few decades.
epgui 10 hours ago [-]
Support for anything Trump in this context is completely detached from reality. Unhinged.
akramachamarei 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think parent was praising Trump, neither directly nor indirectly by praising populism.
throwaway5752 10 hours ago [-]
You're finding somethere where nothing exists on the basis of semantics. Donald Trump is not a populist and he stated economic policy is simply "stated". Society just has become so trusting that someone can go about bald-faced lying about their beliefs and actions, while doing the opposite, without consequence.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are on polar opposite ends of ideologies.
Bernie Sanders has a lifetime record of integrity, working to fairly distribute wealth, and good and transparent governance.
Donald Trump has a lifetime record of bankruptcies, fraud convictions, lying about his policies for the working while governing for the richest people, using government to enrich himself, and using government to hide his misdeeds and shield himself and his business partners from accountability. Donald Trump says he is many things he is not, and simply believing the words that come out of his mouth is being gullible.
I am not even a Bernie Sanders supporter.
WarmWash 10 hours ago [-]
Do you know what populism is, or do you think you know what populism is because you're inferring it from random social media posts?
throwaway5752 9 hours ago [-]
Since you asked, I do.
There's a matter of debate as to what populism is. And on both ends of that debate are Trump and Sanders.
Sanders is the archetype of an ideological populist, related to socialism, and he believes in governing for the popular good, it is why he is an independent. He's a throwback to early 20th century social programs. It is relatively noble and good. He wants fair redistribution of wealth. He wants to remove wealth's influence from the democratic process. He has a lifetime of track record and governance as proof.
Trump is the archetype of the "thin center" populist. He has no real driving philosophy of governance, and demagogues under the banner of populism. He panders to the religious right even though he can't name a book of the Bible. He panders to the nationalists and bigots. He panders to patriots. And he sets up his opposition, regardless of truth, as the opposite of those things.
edit: we're just talking past each other. Bernie Sanders is a left wing populist. Ron Paul is a right wing populist. Massie is a right wing populist. My point is that Trump is simply a fake populist. He says populist things and doesn't believe or act on them for the most part. He's simply a kleptocrat with autocratic tendencies.
akramachamarei 7 hours ago [-]
Since when was Thomas Massie a populist?
deeg 7 hours ago [-]
I think you're right. People have been fooled into thinking he's a populist. He uses some populist trappings but look, for example, what he's done about Epstein: he's running interference for billionaires, contradicting what he promised to do. His bombing of Iran is not populist, either.
WarmWash 9 hours ago [-]
No, there isn't really much debate, but definitely a lot of debate between left wing and right wing populism, which seems to be what you are stuck on.
It seems like I'm trying to tell you he is a populist, and you are trying to tell me his a bad person/bad leader. Which is true, but orthogonal to populism.
But if it helps, in my original comment I laid out many of Trump's populist policies. Ironically many of these are shared with Bernie, or if they had originated with Bernie, would have been celebrated.
Remember many Bernie bros went to trump in 2016, because Hilary's list of policies looks nothing like the one I laid out above.
gchamonlive 11 hours ago [-]
Yet it isn't fair to people that rely on such assistance to drop it without a plan to substitute the assistance provider. It was all done overnight. One day you had outposts serving people in need, the other they had their doors closed.
So don't act like the world should be thankful for all the US has done when it pulls the plug in such a way that is maybe more devastating than having done nothing, because at least nothing would have left the spot for someone else to have risen to the occasion. Maybe this time though without using people's basic needs to create a political tool to be used opportunitistically.
adventured 10 hours ago [-]
The world has never been thankful for the positive things the US has done. The only thing it ever garnered were the briefest of superficial nods. China gets drastically more respect with their approach than the US ever has, while doing a tiny fraction of the good.
The US saved tens of millions of Russians from starvation a century ago. Culturally they have absolutely no clue about that, they're entirely oblivious in terms of their own history. The good deeds never garnered the US any positive credit. Only the bad deeds garner the US bad credit aplenty.
slg 10 hours ago [-]
You do good things because they are good, not to be thanked. It's so bizarre to frame saving lives as something that requires reciprocation.
I want my country to pay for these programs because they save lives and my country is rich enough to afford it. The way people talk about this stuff so amorally is incredibly off-putting.
throwaway3060 10 hours ago [-]
When you constantly get villainized for being involved, that makes it a lot harder to justify to the populace that these things are worth doing. People actually do listen, but not always in the way one intended. At this point, is it any wonder that much of the populace is now convinced that non-involvement is the moral choice? (And I say this as someone who fears this state of affairs)
slg 9 hours ago [-]
>When you constantly get villainized for being involved
The vagueness of "being involved" is doing a lot of work in your comment. How often is the US vilified for these humanitarian programs and why should we pay attention to anyone who vilifies something that is obviously doing good in the world?
throwaway3060 1 hours ago [-]
It is doing a lot of work. People who vilify the US rarely bother to make the distinction, to acknowledge the good (and the ones who do get crowded out). Human nature is not that forgiving.
jbm 10 hours ago [-]
The idea that people did not thank the US is laughable.
I have literally met Japanese people who have been thankful to the US for dropping nukes on them while pissing themselves about North Korea having missiles. The difference is that they perceived the US as an enlightened hegemony, and this is in part because of the relative pennies spent on Africa.
Incidentally, There is an animated series called Gasaraki with an endearingly simplistic and worshipful view of the US that aligns with how they viewed the US, especially at the end.
Good luck with AI hunter killers replacing good will.
dnqthao 10 hours ago [-]
You have underestimated the soft power that US has by being the leader of the world. Now with more isolationism, things will change and that soft power will deteriorize over time. Who knows what will come next but definitely the US cannot project its soft power like before.
aorloff 11 hours ago [-]
You are discounting the notion that other powers have something to gain by letting the US own this fuckup a bit more before reacting
spwa4 11 hours ago [-]
And you are discounting the notion that most of those other powers existed before the US. China did. Europe did. Ottoman empire/islam did. They didn't help. Where are the signs they've changed?
hiddencost 11 hours ago [-]
I can't get my roof replaced in less than a year. These things take time .
SecretDreams 11 hours ago [-]
> Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
One year isn't a lot of time to fill a gap that was previously filled by decades of hard work.
Maybe if the US had had a transition plan, other competent and capable countries could have better filled the gap.
greatgib 10 hours ago [-]
China is there when there is money to make or resources to grab, but in the last decades never helped any one else than themselves.
dyauspitr 10 hours ago [-]
The US was a force for good in the world. There may be a million counterpoints but contemporary American was and still barely is a massive win for the world.
yapyap 8 hours ago [-]
Lol.
The old system recognized that you need an alive world to exploit, financially and through debt. The new system is hoping to rule through raw power because it’s being ran by shortsighted idiots who do not recognize they are standing on the shoulders of more tactical rulers.
Neither of them noble.
jmpman 11 hours ago [-]
Grok is very defensive of Elon's role in the current Ebola outbreak. However if you push on Elon impacting Ebola monitoring, it will eventually admit that Elon's DOGE cancelled "some" Ebola prevention efforts very briefly, but in reality many Ebola related contracts and programs were not fully restored. "Surveillance capacity in eastern DRC weakened, contributing to the current Bundibugyo Ebola strain circulating undetected for an estimated 6–8 weeks before confirmation."
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
A while back "oops, we accidentally canceled ebola monitoring" was a White House press conference laugh line made by Musk, in fact.
Fking Billionaire Wackos are going to be the death of all of us (while they will escape to their New Zealand underground bunkers staffed with robot servants).
WarmWash 10 hours ago [-]
I understand the need for charity, and we should be doing it to support these countries.
But I don't see how to logically make the connection that when you pull that charity back, you are now responsible for any crisis.
That is exactly the argument that people who are against foreign aid make.
Like I will help you walk and feed your dog if you can't all the time, but if I stop doing that and your dog gets sick, that's not my fault and I'm not a bad person.
bonesss 8 hours ago [-]
The US is by leaps and bounds the world’s largest economy.
“Charity” is not foreign aide. Foreign aide keeps the refugees from the one chunk of wherever from overwhelming the government of their neighbour which has a knock-on effect on the price of Critical Defence Material or shipping and/or oil. That bones us, even if we hate everyone involved.
Then, afterwords, everyone has to do a ton of work re-corrupting and re-inserting their business interests into the upstart regimes. We want the Devils we know and have bribed handsomely, new bribes suck.
It has very little to do with ‘them’, per se, and everything to do with our wallets. Granted, normal business people like stability; disruption, famine, and war work very well for others. We prefer to choose when we topple regimes than having food shocks and epidemics thrust it upon us, better ROI and easier scheduling.
jltsiren 2 hours ago [-]
Framing it as charity misses the point.
Power is always based on reciprocal obligations. Everywhere in the world, at every point in history. While modern societies try to formalize the obligations, there are plenty of informal expectations that are equally important.
Because infectious diseases do not respect international borders, someone must be in charge of international surveillance and response to outbreaks. When someone does what must be done for the common good, people tend to see them as a leader. If they stop doing their job as a leader, people interpret it as abandoning their responsibilities. And when someone fails to do what is expected from them, people will think poorly of them.
ceejayoz 10 hours ago [-]
How you pull it back matters.
Why you were doing it in the first place matters, too.
dnqthao 10 hours ago [-]
It is not charity, these are to protect the US against these diseases. Do you think it will stay there and will not come to US shore?
smnrchrds 6 hours ago [-]
Imagine if you fall seriously ill and a charity hospital comes to you and admits you in, giving you medical care and shelter, at no cost to you. You are in dire need of urgent care, so you accept. There are round the clock nurses and doctors and you're attached to a ventilator.
Then one day hospital management changes and the next morning, they fire everyone and turn off your ventilator, not even giving you time to find another hospital to move to. Many patients suffocate to death before noon.
Did the new manager do anything wrong?
SpicyLemonZest 10 hours ago [-]
You're mixing up different "you"s. If the American legislature got together and passed a law saying the American people just don't want to do so much foreign aid anymore, that would be a hard call.
But that's not what happened. Elon Musk, a random rich guy who was not himself financing the charity, appointed himself dictator of all American spending programs. He promised his patron that he would make the government run more efficiently, but found himself unable to. Then he went around randomly breaking charitable programs in an attempt to prove that his failed government efficiency initiative was producing meaningful outcomes. That's why he is accountable (and will be held accountable) for the people his decisions have killed.
jdlshore 8 hours ago [-]
> (and will be held accountable)
Is this just a rhetorical flourish? I’m not up on the details, but it seems like Musk just screwed things up and walked away scot-free. What path do you see for him actually being held accountable for the damage he caused?
SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago [-]
In 2029, there will be a new AG who I hope will make a firm commitment to prosecute Musk and other Trump officials for their crimes. I won't vote for anyone who doesn't promise to extract some level of accountability, although I could imagine being persuaded by an argument that letting Musk skate will allow us to ensure that someone else gets the sentence they deserve.
rafram 10 hours ago [-]
Why are you writing about / thinking about the things an AI model said to you? It’s an LLM trained heavily on Elon tweets and pro-Elon internet content. Of course it’s going to say nice things about Elon. It’s an LLM, not some kind of oracle. It seems like the existence of a massive Ebola outbreak is more worthy of discussion than some random LLM output related to it!
slg 10 hours ago [-]
> It’s an LLM trained heavily on Elon tweets and pro-Elon internet content.
I get what you're saying and generally agree with the overall point, but this specific aspect makes it worth remarking that even the model trained to be pro-Elon concedes Elon is at fault.
e12e 11 hours ago [-]
I was curious if the basic ai chatbots behaved differently - been a while since I tried the same prompt across models..:
This unfortunately won’t be news again until, and I think this is now an until versus if, we find evidence the disease is spreading uncontrollably outside the DRC.
somenameforme 10 hours ago [-]
Ebola isn't like most people think. It isn't airborne, isn't respiratory and requires direct contact with blood/semen/feces/etc to spread. It's also only known to be contagious once symptoms are present. The risk of a global outbreak is very low.
Africa has a large array of unique circumstances that make it much more 'viral' there, including various cultural funerary rituals that involve contact with corpses that can have extremely high viral loads, bushmeat consumption/processing (ebola can spread from animals to humans), as well as all the more stereotypical (and accurate nonetheless) reasons as well that make it particularly dangerous for healthcare workers there.
It's not entirely clear how it could spread uncontrollably outside of Africa.
unsupp0rted 9 hours ago [-]
But surely once somebody explains that kissing (yes, literally) the deceased corpse of an ebola patient is a bad idea they'll stop doing that
JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago [-]
We can’t get our rich, educated populations to wear masks or vaccinate, on what planet are we getting this?
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> Ebola isn't like most people think
Bunga bunga or whatever isn’t classic ebola. And it’s being given an expanding substrate on which to evolve.
etiam 7 hours ago [-]
Bundibugyo (as you are probably actually aware, but others might not be).
It does sound like such a caricature I can see the temptation to be flippant about it though.
dyauspitr 10 hours ago [-]
Viruses are viruses though. Becoming airborne and less deadly (like this current strain) would be a death knell for the world. The longer you let it hang around the longer it has time to adapt. This is why HIV medication is prescribed so overwhelmingly. One of the main goals is to stop all replication immediately or it rather quickly “figures out” how to get past the drug.
jopsen 9 hours ago [-]
There has been a lot of HIV going around, I have yet to hear reports that it's gone airborne.
But, yes, I would rather not have an outbreak of ebola.
dyauspitr 6 hours ago [-]
HIV is a very weak virus. Ebola is significantly more robust.
SilverElfin 12 hours ago [-]
I think that’s going to be true if any disease whose previous outbreaks were only in a “third world” place. The rest of the world easily ignores it. If it was contained but in let’s say - some European country - I bet it would be in the news 24/7 still.
mentalgear 11 hours ago [-]
Exemplified by the ridiculous Hanta-Virus news/social media coverage for weeks - even though the risks were much lower and contained - but it happened on a CRUISE ship which the news people thought might resonate with the western vacation crowd.
SilverElfin 9 hours ago [-]
I view that situation differently. The Andes strain of hantavirus does spread human to human and isn’t well understood. I think caution and coverage makes sense. After all, someone caught it just sitting near an infected person on a plane.
nekzn 11 hours ago [-]
A disease affecting developed countries impacts the entire world. A disease affecting the Congo doesn’t impact anything.
iammjm 11 hours ago [-]
it doesn't until it does
tkz1312 11 hours ago [-]
I mean it obviously impacts the people who live in the Congo...
jansan 11 hours ago [-]
If that outbreak was in a midsize European town like Marburg they would even name the virus after it.
bananamogul 11 hours ago [-]
But not if there was a virus that broke out in, say, Wuhan.
scotty79 12 hours ago [-]
You think an outbreak, in for example Belgium, would be 24/7 news in Demorcatic Republic of Congo?
rjsw 11 hours ago [-]
The DRC is a former Belgian colony, so yes.
TFNA 11 hours ago [-]
Have you ever been to the DRC? Its former colonial master plays almost no role in Congolese society. Belgium made little effort to spread its culture to its colony, rather like the Dutch in Indonesia. Then, after independence, most of the population became isolated from the outside world as central government and education broke down, and the main impact on the country’s politics from outside came from larger, stronger powers than Belgium was.
idiotsecant 11 hours ago [-]
This is such a weirdly tilted and aggressive response, complete with Facebook style demand to prove some strawman nobody ever claimed.
Yes, outbreaks of extremely contagious and deadly disease often are major news stories in other countries, and yes western nations often ignore outbreaks in global south nations.
mft_ 10 hours ago [-]
You might not like the tone, but I don’t think it is a strawman argument.
The discussion is about whether the western media is paying insufficient attention to the Ebola outbreak simply because it’s in DRC, and DRC/Africa doesn’t matter.
The post you responded to is suggesting a different hypothesis: that the media is paying limited attention because it’s in a country quite a long way away, on a different continent. In line with this hypothesis, it’s not unreasonable to question how much attention the press in countries a long way away would focus on a viral outbreak in a European country.
iluvcommunism 10 hours ago [-]
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aleister_777 12 hours ago [-]
Another Congo Ebola special: 17th outbreak since disco, hundreds 'suspected,' headlines screaming apocalypse. Same bat country, same fear cycle.
srameshc 11 hours ago [-]
> headlines screaming apocalypse. Same bat country, same fear cycle
From the article "deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced". People are dying on the planet we all belong to.
ineedasername 11 hours ago [-]
There is a certain mindset that looks at any series of a problem that didn't get worse as evidence that any reaction to it was unwarranted, without considering if it was the why behind the lack of catastrophe. The opposite failure modes are things like security theatre and reasoning from any remotely plausible hypothetical to any desired response, and it's continually frustrating to see people who see neither modes or have a pet peeve against one of them and so jump in the other direction rather than reflect a second on some middle path.
ineedasername 11 hours ago [-]
A scan of headlines doesn't show any "scream of apocalypse", not across multiple news aggregators, incognito mode, etc. Out of dozens I noticed maybe one or two that might have seemed a bit much.
Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.
Did you just dig through the entire post history of this user trying to find a COVID gotcha
christkv 11 hours ago [-]
You are only infectious during illness and it requires contact with fluids. It's exasperated by local funeral rituals where people interact with the dead body and get infected.
zulux 11 hours ago [-]
"relatives slept in the same room as the body, stayed beside it continuously, or had direct physical contact during overnight mourning."
I’ll do my best to avoid the overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.
BJones12 7 hours ago [-]
This is a great example of how some cultures are better than others.
bananamogul 11 hours ago [-]
This makes the recent burning of ebola clinic tents by angry relatives make more sense.
I wonder if you have sources on this? I heard that this is a new variant that has a much longer incubation time. A longer time until symptoms appear means it will spread much quicker and wider (that was also the issue with Covid that had a incubation time of 5 - 8 days).
ShinyLeftPad 10 hours ago [-]
This variant may have longer incubation time but you are almost not infectious without symptoms. The more symptomatic you become, the more you spread. This is in contrast to COVID or some flus where you are most infectious in the incubation period.
The "coughing up blood" symptom can cause you to come into contact with fluids involuntarily.
doubled112 9 hours ago [-]
Avoid anybody who is coughing up blood. Noted.
I tend to do this naturally. Even people who sound like they might cough up blood.
christkv 10 hours ago [-]
sure but's not flu or covid in ability to spread.
pixelpoet 11 hours ago [-]
Exacerbated*, however it surely is exasperating how poorly this is being handled.
christkv 10 hours ago [-]
Do you know how big this area is and how difficult it is?
SecretDreams 11 hours ago [-]
So your claim is this won't be an issue for the rest of the world? What are the underlying implications from your statement?
christkv 11 hours ago [-]
That it does not spread that easily and that its current spread is more a combination of factors in the specific area. War, hunger, refugees, culture and lack of education. It’s to say it’s hard for it to land and expand. Once you have symptoms the patient is also very quickly immobilized reducing the spread further.
illusive4080 11 hours ago [-]
0% chance this spreads rapidly in the first world.
hedora 11 hours ago [-]
Like Trump 1.0’s handling of COVID, this outbreak is going to spread further and faster than it would have if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives.
Those initiatives inevitably cost far less than the economic impact of outbreaks (the US is currently diverting international travelers), but the best deal maker in the history of the universe says they’re a “bad deal”, so the rest of the planet gets to suffer.
BJones12 11 hours ago [-]
> if the US continued to pay for international health initiatives
There are ~197 countries in the world, you should also criticize the other 196 for also not wanting to pay for the exact same thing.
jeremyjh 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe there should have been a plan. A period of notice and a transition plan. It couldn't happen, since the Trump administration does not believe in competence, only in spectacle.
delfinom 10 hours ago [-]
More so none of them have actually started and ran a real successful business. Just trustfund babies who don't know how anything operates.
thinkingtoilet 11 hours ago [-]
I'm American. I will criticize America. If you live in another country, you work there to improve how you help the least fortunate people on the planet. I'm not going to write letters to the government of Turkmenistan. It should also be noted America is the richest country in the history of the world so expecting to do more is quite reasonable.
mft_ 10 hours ago [-]
The bigger picture is we should have a global agency to deal with such issues, funded proportionally by all countries (within reason). That humanity hasn’t been able to achieve such collaboration (unless and many other topics) is a miserable indictment of our progress as a species.
unsupp0rted 9 hours ago [-]
When has a global agency funded proportionally by all countries not solved the problem at hand?
SecretDreams 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe there could have been direct solicitation for funds from other countries before suddenly and dramatically pulling the plug on decades of hard work?
dfxm12 10 hours ago [-]
The US touts itself as being in the position of the richest and most powerful country in the world. The president lays claim to the title "leader of the free world". They deserve the blame to match their means and influence.
I'm also not going to criticize, for example, the UK, for recently providing 20 million pounds in new aid to help contain the outbreak...
senectus1 1 hours ago [-]
given how Trump is the direct cause of making flights so expensive that many countries are slowing down or stopping flights to or from them... there is a fair chance his incompetence is going to directly lead to a lack of spreading.
mentalgear 11 hours ago [-]
And just like during the COVID pandemic, look who sits in the White (Casino) House again ... with Elon's DOGE having cut even more essential pandemic monitoring and response systems.
It’s interesting to note that in the end, there was no one else coming: we were it. A large amount of disease containment and control was just fronted by the United States. As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. It’s not that the Chinese century will have their massive industrial engine put to the tasks that America put hers to. It’s just that things won’t get done.
Sobering, really, that despite all the ascendance of new powers (who do not yet share the norms) and the noble aims of the old (who are too weak), one year after the US left no one has filled the gap.
The organization has been burnt down in 12 months, but the expertise still exists. There are signs that the international community will finally start working on climate change now that the US has pulled out of the treaties. The Chinese are a decade ahead of the west when it comes to building cars.
The WHO admits they screwed this outbreak handling up badly, but, by my understanding, they screwed up less than the US did in Wuhan in 2019, and they’re exhibiting the will to improve instead of shifting blame (remember all the “investigations” of the Chinese biological weapons research programs that were co-funded and co-operated by the US with federal funds?)
I think we’re going to see some more dark years before a one-two punch that improves things dramatically:
1) international organizations step up to fill the vacuum the US left
2) After the 2026-2028 new Dust Bowl / Great Depression the US is heading into, voters (state and federal) in the US are going to demand progressive and populist candidates that will actually attempt to put the US back on competitive economic footing.
Now if those cars are actually good, price independent, then that would be worth mentioning.
First we laughed at them, then we fought them, then they won, then we solved the problem with protectionist tariffs.
Uhhh no? How did they screw up? They were notified late, and then they did what they were supposed to do.
His economic policy has way more overlap with Bernie's than people tend to understand. Both believe immigration lowers wages, and both believe tariffs are imperative (you have to dig back to pre-2017 talk from Bernie, he changed his website/talking points after Trump won).
Edit: People struggle so hard with politics because everyone is totally blinded by there side. Here are populist things Trump has done/trying to do
- remove taxes on tips
- implement tariffs on foreign goods
- implement strict immigration policy (note sanders wanted a pathway to citizenship, he did not want an open border, and he never addressed how he would handle millions showing up at the border)
- block corporate landlords from single family home ownership
- create a government funded college level education program to get free bachelor degrees.
- take government ownership stake in large American companies (us steel, intel)
- cap interest rates on credit cards
- lower central bank interest rates
- de-criminalizing drugs, reschedule marijuana
- pro crypto
- pro prediction markets
Guys, you can hate Trump, you can accurately access he isn't intelligent or competent, criticize his brutish approach, but if you cannot recognize he is a populist, you are objectively lost-in-the-sauce.
Just specific to tariffs, if you are a US company that wants to setup domestic manufacturing you have no idea what the situation will be next week much less several years from now. The chaos isn’t good for anyone but Trump. The rule of law is as much about stability as it is freedom.
My own megacorp is continuing to build mass manufacturing capacity in Europe, specifically because tariffs are causing hassles for US import and export, and our EU buyers are demanding EU made after the bull decided to destroy all diplomatic relations built the last few decades.
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are on polar opposite ends of ideologies.
Bernie Sanders has a lifetime record of integrity, working to fairly distribute wealth, and good and transparent governance.
Donald Trump has a lifetime record of bankruptcies, fraud convictions, lying about his policies for the working while governing for the richest people, using government to enrich himself, and using government to hide his misdeeds and shield himself and his business partners from accountability. Donald Trump says he is many things he is not, and simply believing the words that come out of his mouth is being gullible.
I am not even a Bernie Sanders supporter.
There's a matter of debate as to what populism is. And on both ends of that debate are Trump and Sanders.
Sanders is the archetype of an ideological populist, related to socialism, and he believes in governing for the popular good, it is why he is an independent. He's a throwback to early 20th century social programs. It is relatively noble and good. He wants fair redistribution of wealth. He wants to remove wealth's influence from the democratic process. He has a lifetime of track record and governance as proof.
Trump is the archetype of the "thin center" populist. He has no real driving philosophy of governance, and demagogues under the banner of populism. He panders to the religious right even though he can't name a book of the Bible. He panders to the nationalists and bigots. He panders to patriots. And he sets up his opposition, regardless of truth, as the opposite of those things.
Trump is a populist in the way the Goebbels set Hitler up as a populist (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/making-a-l..., https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/1934-nazi-pa..., and https://museums.nuernberg.de/documentation-center/topics/nat...). That is to say, he is not one at all, he just lies about it to exploit division.
edit: we're just talking past each other. Bernie Sanders is a left wing populist. Ron Paul is a right wing populist. Massie is a right wing populist. My point is that Trump is simply a fake populist. He says populist things and doesn't believe or act on them for the most part. He's simply a kleptocrat with autocratic tendencies.
It seems like I'm trying to tell you he is a populist, and you are trying to tell me his a bad person/bad leader. Which is true, but orthogonal to populism.
But if it helps, in my original comment I laid out many of Trump's populist policies. Ironically many of these are shared with Bernie, or if they had originated with Bernie, would have been celebrated.
Remember many Bernie bros went to trump in 2016, because Hilary's list of policies looks nothing like the one I laid out above.
So don't act like the world should be thankful for all the US has done when it pulls the plug in such a way that is maybe more devastating than having done nothing, because at least nothing would have left the spot for someone else to have risen to the occasion. Maybe this time though without using people's basic needs to create a political tool to be used opportunitistically.
The US saved tens of millions of Russians from starvation a century ago. Culturally they have absolutely no clue about that, they're entirely oblivious in terms of their own history. The good deeds never garnered the US any positive credit. Only the bad deeds garner the US bad credit aplenty.
I want my country to pay for these programs because they save lives and my country is rich enough to afford it. The way people talk about this stuff so amorally is incredibly off-putting.
The vagueness of "being involved" is doing a lot of work in your comment. How often is the US vilified for these humanitarian programs and why should we pay attention to anyone who vilifies something that is obviously doing good in the world?
I have literally met Japanese people who have been thankful to the US for dropping nukes on them while pissing themselves about North Korea having missiles. The difference is that they perceived the US as an enlightened hegemony, and this is in part because of the relative pennies spent on Africa.
Incidentally, There is an animated series called Gasaraki with an endearingly simplistic and worshipful view of the US that aligns with how they viewed the US, especially at the end.
Good luck with AI hunter killers replacing good will.
One year isn't a lot of time to fill a gap that was previously filled by decades of hard work.
Maybe if the US had had a transition plan, other competent and capable countries could have better filled the gap.
The old system recognized that you need an alive world to exploit, financially and through debt. The new system is hoping to rule through raw power because it’s being ran by shortsighted idiots who do not recognize they are standing on the shoulders of more tactical rulers.
Neither of them noble.
https://x.com/factpostnews/status/2056461616162431323
But I don't see how to logically make the connection that when you pull that charity back, you are now responsible for any crisis.
That is exactly the argument that people who are against foreign aid make.
Like I will help you walk and feed your dog if you can't all the time, but if I stop doing that and your dog gets sick, that's not my fault and I'm not a bad person.
“Charity” is not foreign aide. Foreign aide keeps the refugees from the one chunk of wherever from overwhelming the government of their neighbour which has a knock-on effect on the price of Critical Defence Material or shipping and/or oil. That bones us, even if we hate everyone involved.
Then, afterwords, everyone has to do a ton of work re-corrupting and re-inserting their business interests into the upstart regimes. We want the Devils we know and have bribed handsomely, new bribes suck.
It has very little to do with ‘them’, per se, and everything to do with our wallets. Granted, normal business people like stability; disruption, famine, and war work very well for others. We prefer to choose when we topple regimes than having food shocks and epidemics thrust it upon us, better ROI and easier scheduling.
Power is always based on reciprocal obligations. Everywhere in the world, at every point in history. While modern societies try to formalize the obligations, there are plenty of informal expectations that are equally important.
Because infectious diseases do not respect international borders, someone must be in charge of international surveillance and response to outbreaks. When someone does what must be done for the common good, people tend to see them as a leader. If they stop doing their job as a leader, people interpret it as abandoning their responsibilities. And when someone fails to do what is expected from them, people will think poorly of them.
Why you were doing it in the first place matters, too.
Then one day hospital management changes and the next morning, they fire everyone and turn off your ventilator, not even giving you time to find another hospital to move to. Many patients suffocate to death before noon.
Did the new manager do anything wrong?
But that's not what happened. Elon Musk, a random rich guy who was not himself financing the charity, appointed himself dictator of all American spending programs. He promised his patron that he would make the government run more efficiently, but found himself unable to. Then he went around randomly breaking charitable programs in an attempt to prove that his failed government efficiency initiative was producing meaningful outcomes. That's why he is accountable (and will be held accountable) for the people his decisions have killed.
Is this just a rhetorical flourish? I’m not up on the details, but it seems like Musk just screwed things up and walked away scot-free. What path do you see for him actually being held accountable for the damage he caused?
I get what you're saying and generally agree with the overall point, but this specific aspect makes it worth remarking that even the model trained to be pro-Elon concedes Elon is at fault.
Apparently Gemini is the late night news anchor:
https://g.co/gemini/share/3504289b8dc8
Chatgpt the art critic:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a11e80e-523c-83ea-9a1b-03329f860c...
And grok somewhat of an apologist:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_4071d2b9-ae39-43cc-abf1-cd...
Africa has a large array of unique circumstances that make it much more 'viral' there, including various cultural funerary rituals that involve contact with corpses that can have extremely high viral loads, bushmeat consumption/processing (ebola can spread from animals to humans), as well as all the more stereotypical (and accurate nonetheless) reasons as well that make it particularly dangerous for healthcare workers there.
It's not entirely clear how it could spread uncontrollably outside of Africa.
Bunga bunga or whatever isn’t classic ebola. And it’s being given an expanding substrate on which to evolve.
It does sound like such a caricature I can see the temptation to be flippant about it though.
But, yes, I would rather not have an outbreak of ebola.
Yes, outbreaks of extremely contagious and deadly disease often are major news stories in other countries, and yes western nations often ignore outbreaks in global south nations.
The discussion is about whether the western media is paying insufficient attention to the Ebola outbreak simply because it’s in DRC, and DRC/Africa doesn’t matter.
The post you responded to is suggesting a different hypothesis: that the media is paying limited attention because it’s in a country quite a long way away, on a different continent. In line with this hypothesis, it’s not unreasonable to question how much attention the press in countries a long way away would focus on a viral outbreak in a European country.
From the article "deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced". People are dying on the planet we all belong to.
Other than that, I think it bears considering that any specific level of fear may be a factor in the safeguard that have been put in place to mitigate outbreaks. Without some level of fear, not much would be done. I don't know if it's the direction your thoughts were going in, but an unreflected gut reaction of "just fear, it's never amounted to much" is the potential catalyst for removing guardrails that have prevented worse outbreaks. It's important not to reason solely from that sort of counterfactual premise but chesterton's fence should apply when considering "was the fear justified, has it played a part in directing responses and if so has that response been calibrated to the reality or too much by the fear?" We need to get past this tendency to leave things a hot-takes and gut checks.
You were right 6 years ago about a strong response needed for COVID: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22315024
I’ll do my best to avoid the overnight cuddle vigil with an Ebola corpse.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ebola-tent-fire-congo-9.721000...
I tend to do this naturally. Even people who sound like they might cough up blood.
Those initiatives inevitably cost far less than the economic impact of outbreaks (the US is currently diverting international travelers), but the best deal maker in the history of the universe says they’re a “bad deal”, so the rest of the planet gets to suffer.
There are ~197 countries in the world, you should also criticize the other 196 for also not wanting to pay for the exact same thing.
I'm also not going to criticize, for example, the UK, for recently providing 20 million pounds in new aid to help contain the outbreak...