The Age of Brittle

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lpm
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by lpm » Mon Mar 02, 2020 11:16 am

Obama abused the system. When he failed to get things through the Republican controlled Congress, he used executive orders to basically do the opposite of the will of the democratically elected Congressional representatives. We can't say this is just Trump - there are far deeper problems.
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Mar 02, 2020 11:36 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 11:16 am
Obama abused the system. When he failed to get things through the Republican controlled Congress, he used executive orders to basically do the opposite of the will of the democratically elected Congressional representatives. We can't say this is just Trump - there are far deeper problems.
Indeed. On one hand, the President is able to overrule any number of elected officials (at least on certain matters). On the other, the decentralisation - giving all states powers that are disproportionate to their population - can also result in a minority being able to overrule the majority, including on issues where geography isn't relevant.

I can see an argument for devolving certain issues completely to states. I am less clear on the wisdom of having federal policy beholden to the whims of history and geography.
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Gfamily » Mon Mar 02, 2020 12:02 pm

dyqik wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 11:07 am
Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 9:57 am

Alternatively, the US has the highest level of health security according to this index: https://www.ghsindex.org/

I can believe it, because the resources given to parts of the government like the CDC are enormous.

Perhaps the best way to be non-brittle is to be rich. ETA and the US is the richest economy out there (excluding a few small states, especially those sitting on massive natural resources).
We're seeing right now how that is completely false. One President guts the CDC's pandemic response in one year's budget, and replaces experts with loyal stooges and "poof!" it's gone.

Meanwhile, American healthcare in a pandemic is as good as that given to its poorest people. Because viruses spread to all members of society when someone is too poor to skip work and lose income while symptomatic, too poor to get medical treatment, and too poor to spend money on over preparedness.

US healthcare is also stretched to breaking point. There are whole counties with one doctor, and even up around here in the rich and crowded North East, there are shortages of staff.
I saw one comment on a BTL site claiming that the GHSIndex placing is in part because 'the US spends more of its GDP on healthcare than anywhere else'. :roll:
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Mar 02, 2020 1:44 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 10:11 am
No, it's the opposite.

When you're poor, severe blows don't break the system. Ebola in Congo kills people but does not collapse society. To break feudal England it took the massive sledge hammer of half the population dying of plague.
I disagree. Lets take the example of a massive earthquake which occurs next to a coastal city.

In 1995 a 6.9 quake hit Kobe in Japan, and in 2010 a 7.0 quake hit Port au Prince in Haiti. Both experienced widespread destruction and loss of power, water and other essential services.

Wealthy and complex Japan was able to mobilize enormous resources to reconstruct the city and care for the victims. In contrast, in much less complex but very poor Haiti six months after the earthquake almost none of the rubble had been cleared. The misery of the victims was compounded by a cholera epidemic. Years later tens of thousands of earthquake victims were still living in camps.

If you are looking for a disaster which collapsed how society functions, then it happened for years in in Port au Prince, Haiti, and for a few days in Kobe, Japan.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:21 pm

In terms of recovering from severe blows, a key issue is redundancy. How many excess and unused resources are there that can be drawn upon?

Poor societies have very little redundancy. All the useful resources are already being used up. Any shock and there is nothing to draw upon.

Rich countries have a huge amount of redundancy. There are lots of resources that can easily be re-purposed or diverted from one place to another.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:23 pm

Gfamily wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 12:02 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 11:07 am
Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 9:57 am

Alternatively, the US has the highest level of health security according to this index: https://www.ghsindex.org/

I can believe it, because the resources given to parts of the government like the CDC are enormous.

Perhaps the best way to be non-brittle is to be rich. ETA and the US is the richest economy out there (excluding a few small states, especially those sitting on massive natural resources).
We're seeing right now how that is completely false. One President guts the CDC's pandemic response in one year's budget, and replaces experts with loyal stooges and "poof!" it's gone.

Meanwhile, American healthcare in a pandemic is as good as that given to its poorest people. Because viruses spread to all members of society when someone is too poor to skip work and lose income while symptomatic, too poor to get medical treatment, and too poor to spend money on over preparedness.

US healthcare is also stretched to breaking point. There are whole counties with one doctor, and even up around here in the rich and crowded North East, there are shortages of staff.
I saw one comment on a BTL site claiming that the GHSIndex placing is in part because 'the US spends more of its GDP on healthcare than anywhere else'. :roll:
You can read how the score for the US is calculated here: https://www.ghsindex.org/country/united-states/

It's not based upon proportion of GDP spent on healthcare.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by bmforre » Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:23 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 1:44 pm
If you are looking for a disaster which collapsed how society functions, then it happened for years in in Port au Prince, Haiti, and for a few days in Kobe, Japan.
And the severe long-duration outbreak in Haiti was brought there by agents sent by the UN to help. Haiti was defenceless against this.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:34 pm

bmforre wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:23 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 1:44 pm
If you are looking for a disaster which collapsed how society functions, then it happened for years in in Port au Prince, Haiti, and for a few days in Kobe, Japan.
And the severe long-duration outbreak in Haiti was brought there by agents sent by the UN to help. Haiti was defenceless against this.
Yes, indeed. Which is part of the problem. As a poor country Haiti was dependent upon outsiders for assistance, and had to accept assistance form incompetent outsiders who made the situation worse. As a rich country, Japan could organize aid and reconstruction itself.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by dyqik » Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:47 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:23 pm

You can read how the score for the US is calculated here: https://www.ghsindex.org/country/united-states/

It's not based upon proportion of GDP spent on healthcare.
But the access to health care score is 25 out of 100, 175th in the world, while the capacity in health clinics and facilities is 60/100, 12th in the world.

So basically the US has great researchers, capacity to develop responses, the capability to recognize issues at the CDC type level, loads of money to develop and start production of drugs/vaccines, and ability to work out what the right thing to do is, and very little capability to actually carry out that response and administer drugs to individuals if it requires front-line medical care of the whole population. Or to make politicians actually listen to the CDC or similar.

As such, its exposure to risk is middling, 59th-ish on a few areas, 117th in environmental risks, and 1st in others. But many of these risks are cumulative under certain hazards rather than independent - you need to beat each a number of them in sequence, to e.g. deal with a pandemic.

The other factor is that the public healthcare risk element is based on just two indicators - life expectancy and "Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ) Index frontier score", which are both just single numbers. This makes no allowance at all for the massive inequalities in the US for this. And public health as far as pandemics are concerned is only as good as that of the population least able to access it.
Last edited by dyqik on Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:54 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 1:44 pm
lpm wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 10:11 am
No, it's the opposite.

When you're poor, severe blows don't break the system. Ebola in Congo kills people but does not collapse society. To break feudal England it took the massive sledge hammer of half the population dying of plague.
I disagree. Lets take the example of a massive earthquake which occurs next to a coastal city.

In 1995 a 6.9 quake hit Kobe in Japan, and in 2010 a 7.0 quake hit Port au Prince in Haiti. Both experienced widespread destruction and loss of power, water and other essential services.

Wealthy and complex Japan was able to mobilize enormous resources to reconstruct the city and care for the victims. In contrast, in much less complex but very poor Haiti six months after the earthquake almost none of the rubble had been cleared. The misery of the victims was compounded by a cholera epidemic. Years later tens of thousands of earthquake victims were still living in camps.

If you are looking for a disaster which collapsed how society functions, then it happened for years in in Port au Prince, Haiti, and for a few days in Kobe, Japan.
And here is the argument in article form: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40042902?s ... b_contents

tl;dr rich democracies are much better able to cope with natural disasters like earthquakes than are poor non-democratic states, and so have lower fatalities (and the reason isn't that the former experience fewer earthquakes).

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by lpm » Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:57 pm

But Kobe was a regional event. It wasn't integral to the entire society.

The comparison would be something like all the banks in Liverpool failing. A major local problem. But in 2008 RBS and Lloyds banks were embedded in the structure of the entire UK. If they'd been allowed to go bankrupt it would've had immediate knock-on impacts in every town and sector. Hence the government was prepared to spend billions of our money to ensure they survived.

This isn't about routine one-offs like earthquakes. It's about society's structures being unable to flex in response to fundamental imbalances.
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Mar 02, 2020 3:07 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 2:57 pm
But Kobe was a regional event. It wasn't integral to the entire society.

The comparison would be something like all the banks in Liverpool failing. A major local problem. But in 2008 RBS and Lloyds banks were embedded in the structure of the entire UK. If they'd been allowed to go bankrupt it would've had immediate knock-on impacts in every town and sector. Hence the government was prepared to spend billions of our money to ensure they survived.

This isn't about routine one-offs like earthquakes. It's about society's structures being unable to flex in response to fundamental imbalances.
The bold bit is the key point. As a rich country the UK was able to spend billions to prop up the financial system.

There is a good example of a financial crisis leading to an actual collapse in society. It occurred in Albania in 1997 . The Albanian government wasn't able to bail everyone out. Poor countries have much fewer options and can't spend their way out of trouble like rich countries can.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by lpm » Mon Mar 02, 2020 3:15 pm

Money isn't resources. You can't bail out hospitals by buying more nurses and beds. The govt can't buy extra access at Dover, can't spend to remove flood water from the Severn, can't put food in supermarkets.
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Mon Mar 02, 2020 3:18 pm

Well, not in a short timescale, anyway
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by dyqik » Mon Mar 02, 2020 3:24 pm

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 3:18 pm
Well, not in a short timescale, anyway
Nor by magically providing money for one year some time before you need it.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Mar 02, 2020 3:58 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 3:15 pm
Money isn't resources. You can't bail out hospitals by buying more nurses and beds. The govt can't buy extra access at Dover, can't spend to remove flood water from the Severn, can't put food in supermarkets.
Indeed, you can’t eat money. But money does buy you the resources you do need. In particular it means that you start out with far more resources.

Imagine how the UK would compare with Mozambique when coping with a pandemic, massive flooding or a sudden drop in food production.

The UK already has far more doctors and nurses, hospitals and stocks of pharmaceuticals. As we’ve seen in China a well resourced government can rapidly set up new hospitals. If there is a global Covid-19 epidemic and you want to survive, pretty much the last thing you want to do is relocate to Maputo.

Likewise with flooding. As we saw in Mozambique in 2000, the country had very little means to cope with flooding. The UK has far more helicopters, boats and all-terrain vehicles to get people out of flooded areas. It also has an enormously greater ability to construct temporary housing.

Similarly with a natural disaster affecting food production. In the very short term, UK households contain much higher stocks of food than do households in Mozambique. The contents of freezers, fridges and cupboards are far greater in Manchester than in Maputo. In the longer term the UK has enormously greater capacity to buy food and then transport it. Mozambique would be left to the generosity of outsiders.

ETA: again, this is about redundancy. If you have far more resources than you need to survive then it’s possible to reallocate some of them to deal with a crisis.

If you are poor and are barely subsisting then when a crisis occurs there is nothing you can do.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by lpm » Mon Mar 02, 2020 5:19 pm

That assumes reasonably distributed resources within a rich country. But they aren't. Self-isolation costs me nothing, leads to zero income for others.

Many people in the UK are extremely thin in terms of personal redundancy. They don't have cash to spare at the end of the month, don't have room to store groceries, don't have a car to have flexible access to resources. Could resources-but-inequality make things even worse? We all now expect the govt to provide for us, in normal times and in emergencies, and a two tiered outcome of provision could be disastrous.
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Mar 02, 2020 5:50 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 5:19 pm
That assumes reasonably distributed resources within a rich country. But they aren't. Self-isolation costs me nothing, leads to zero income for others.

Many people in the UK are extremely thin in terms of personal redundancy. They don't have cash to spare at the end of the month, don't have room to store groceries, don't have a car to have flexible access to resources. Could resources-but-inequality make things even worse? We all now expect the govt to provide for us, in normal times and in emergencies, and a two tiered outcome of provision could be disastrous.
Yes, that’s an issue. Though it’s basically one of the U.K. choosing not to be resilient rather than it being unable.

Who knows, maybe a crisis may prompt some redistribution - as it did in the US with Roosevelt’s new deal or in the UK with the creation of the welfare state after WW2.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by AMS » Mon Mar 02, 2020 9:46 pm

An article on supermarkets readying themselves - basically sounds like their plan is to carry more stocks of the staples, at the expense of the range of products. Interesting too that it mentions Tesco wargaming plans for a flu pandemic a couple of years back.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... nic-buying

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by bmforre » Mon Mar 02, 2020 10:22 pm

AMS wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 9:46 pm
... Tesco wargaming plans for a flu pandemic a couple of years back.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... nic-buying
I have some probably outdated ideas of what traditional wargaming kit looks like. Brave tin soldiers, model guns, that kind of thing.
What do kits for wargaming pandemics look like and who supplies such equipment that should now be in urgent demand? Must we make do with virtual pestilence for training that's now vital?

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by basementer » Mon Mar 02, 2020 11:35 pm

bmforre wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 10:22 pm
AMS wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 9:46 pm
... Tesco wargaming plans for a flu pandemic a couple of years back.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... nic-buying
I have some probably outdated ideas of what traditional wargaming kit looks like. Brave tin soldiers, model guns, that kind of thing.
What do kits for wargaming pandemics look like and who supplies such equipment that should now be in urgent demand? Must we make do with virtual pestilence for training that's now vital?
I like the idea of the board of Tesco sitting round the conference table playing Pandemic.
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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by dyqik » Tue Mar 03, 2020 12:02 am

bmforre wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 10:22 pm
AMS wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 9:46 pm
... Tesco wargaming plans for a flu pandemic a couple of years back.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... nic-buying
I have some probably outdated ideas of what traditional wargaming kit looks like. Brave tin soldiers, model guns, that kind of thing.
What do kits for wargaming pandemics look like and who supplies such equipment that should now be in urgent demand? Must we make do with virtual pestilence for training that's now vital?
You have a big laminated world map on the wall, and move supermarket own brand sticker plasters (which have all the adhesive qualities of post-it notes), with different supplies written on them in marker pen, around it.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Mar 03, 2020 7:50 am

dyqik wrote:
Tue Mar 03, 2020 12:02 am
bmforre wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 10:22 pm
AMS wrote:
Mon Mar 02, 2020 9:46 pm
... Tesco wargaming plans for a flu pandemic a couple of years back.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... nic-buying
I have some probably outdated ideas of what traditional wargaming kit looks like. Brave tin soldiers, model guns, that kind of thing.
What do kits for wargaming pandemics look like and who supplies such equipment that should now be in urgent demand? Must we make do with virtual pestilence for training that's now vital?
You have a big laminated world map on the wall, and move supermarket own brand sticker plasters (which have all the adhesive qualities of post-it notes), with different supplies written on them in marker pen, around it.
And for the paranoid conspiracy version you connect different supplies and supermarkets with bits of string.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by AMS » Tue Mar 03, 2020 7:59 am

Anyway, my point was that the companies that supply and distribute most of the UK's food have thought about this in advance, and appear to be activating plans. It's a nice example of the resilience of a relatively wealthy society.

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Re: The Age of Brittle

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Mar 03, 2020 8:09 am

AMS wrote:
Tue Mar 03, 2020 7:59 am
Anyway, my point was that the companies that supply and distribute most of the UK's food have thought about this in advance, and appear to be activating plans. It's a nice example of the resilience of a relatively wealthy society.
Yes, indeed.

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