Thread · HN Continuity

This broadly covers something I've been musing writing a post about. The real bad things that happen, much like the good things, happen slowly and don't have the salience necessary for people to pay attention in the current age.

We're always looking for catastrophes or victories that happen in a matter of days, something that can be summarized in a Chyron. But in general the systems that really count work more slowly and with more complexity than that.

Things don't have to be apocalyptic to be bad. We have been on a rollercoaster of sea freight costs (SCFI) since COVID and the knock on impact on prices only seems to go in one direction. It adds to demographic and housing crises and government debt crises. Add in an energy crisis following on from the same crisis barely weathered at the start of the full invasion of Ukraine, add in a fertilizer crisis, add in a once-in-a-thousand year El Nino and things fall apart.

Humanity has always faced crises, many thought the world would end in nuclear fallout roughly half a century ago, but things don't have to have the salience of a nuclear bomb going off in the neighborhood to make everything worse. And it is a slow and gradual disaster.

The current strain of populism works the same way. Screwworm eradication efforts aren't sexy, they don't have high salience and they play into people's view that the government spends money and time doing nothing. And you remove the system and it doesn't fall apart immediately, and the effects are muddied with climate change impacts and so on. The doomsday predictions don't come to pass and people don't stick around to see the slow, creeping disaster they unleashed.