No. I remember 9/11, and this feels worse. The world won’t be the same for a decade. Are you too young to remember when you could just walk straight onto a plane without being searched? Those days never came back.

From now on, a serious pandemic will never be some weird future scenario ever again. It will be a politicized issue.

We are seeing a real pandemic - something that has been the stuff of Hollywood movies for most in our generation. Maybe it's comparable in some aspects to the only other WHO-official pandemic: HIV/AIDS.

But this has an order of magnitude more impact on the entire planet and societies as we know them.

The stock markets look like load test graphs I see in Grafana every day. Steady ramp up and then after 90 minutes boom its over back to 0.

America is still not the same. I'm not talking about airport security, although that's a minor, minor difference. I'm talking about the government, the society, the culture. The terrorists won on 9/11 and they've been winning every day since. America is not a free country, if it ever was. The surveillance state has been ramped up. The police state has been ramped up. Wars have been ramped up. We started a war with a completely unrelated country and killed millions. Life for most citizens is absolute shit, barely making it by.

9/11 was not just a battle. It started a war the terrorists have been winning ever since. That's probably why there haven't really been any major attacks since then. Why try to attack America when us idiot Americans are attacking each other and bringing down the empire ourselves? The terrorists are just watching with glee.

The American ideal was land of the free and brave, and the writing at the Statue of Liberty welcomed poor refugees. But now Stephen Miller sits in the White House and is whispering Nazi ideas into a senile infant's ear.

I remember 9/11, saw the second plane hit with my own eyes. Other than airports and flying being more inconvenient nothing fundamental really changed as I saw it. People still traveled, people still flew and so on. Now you just budget an extra hour before a flight.

Geopolitics has seen massive impact since then. For example, the rise of ISIS is a direct descendant of the Iraq war which is a direct consequence of corrupt and criminal decision making by the Bush/Cheney admin in response to 9/11.

Debatable if the Arab Spring would have occurred without it, as the Middle East might have been much more stable.

Hear hear. And war refugees entering Europe is causing right-wing populism to rise (not that years of stupid austerity polcies was helping).

Would Brexit have happened without 9/11?

There's an ancient TIME article I have in my archives highlighting how the Dubya admin ignored Clinton's intelligence team's attempts to hand over info about the threat of a terrorist attack in the US. Would 9/11 have been prevented if Gore had won 2000? God damn hanging chads and rigged elections...

Sure but the comment I responded to wasn't about geopolitics but daily life changes.

Because geopolitics does not change daily life? Damn, you should see some geopolitics where I live.

Pretty much the US just introduced the security measures other countries had had for years before.

The TSA has been proven many times over to be totally ineffectual security theater - theres this popular report from a few years back that the TSA has a 95% failure rate when their measures are tested[1].

It doesn't go anywhere because there is now a lot of private industry in it for contract money to supply the spectacle whom have the lobbying power to keep it in place, but it is a total waste of money and gross violation of privacy for no positive benefit to society.

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tsa-fails-95-percent-tests-ho...

Ok, I misspoke : the US introduced less effective security measures than other countries had before.

In particular you'll see other countries focus on measures like interviewing (briefly) the passengers as they board.

> I remember 9/11

It's not the same stuff! Terrorism is backed by people actively wanting to harm other human beings, while the appearance of a new dangerous virus is a random process.

I think more of the 2004 tsunami.

I can imagine that the one thing people will remember is stocking up on supplies.

Expect even emptier shelves way earlier when the next epidemic comes.

People stocked up supplies all over Europe when Chernobyl happened. This is not what we remember most. What we remember is "nuclear is dangerous". Some countries decommissioned their own power plants and didn't build new ones anymore. Example: Italy.

I'm sure that if everything ends well I'll remember being at home for a few weeks. I'm sure this is going to be a major turning point in history (more than Chernobyl and 9/11) but I'm not betting on what's going to be the direction it takes.

Sometimes, I wonder if even that last part is the case. A lot of people do absolutely insane things for short term convenience.

In a year, it might still not be over.

Not for something this big, and for something that won't go away for 18 months MINIMUM