I think that, in XXI century, we're realizing that the human race is not yet ready for globalization. Heck, we still can't even assimilate into respective cultures properly. People emigrate from places with problems, then insist the place they immigrated to should be like the place they emigrated from.

As much as it pains me, I think you might be right. Perhaps we're not ready yet.

Then again, who's ready the first time they do something? This pandemic has made obvious a lot of places where our attempt at globalization doesn't work. I hope our societies will learn from it and do better next time.

How would it work if we got globalism "right"? What if instead of a virus, it was an asteroid which instantly destroyed all the factories in Country X, so there's no way for Country X to send supplies overseas even if they wanted to? If we want to be safe from events like that, we better not outsource any critical production to Country X. But if we don't outsource any critical production to any foreign countries, what's even left of globalism then?

I think doing globalism right would require everyone to mandate some amount of redundancies be left in the supply chains. Some amount of fat left uncut. All in order to derisk the economy in case a random piece of it gets shut down by force majeure.

I mean, imagine if all of AWS was just a single data centre labeled us-west-1. Imagine something happened to it. This is comparable to how Wuhan shutting down impacted the global supply chains.

(I lack a good web comparison for what happened afterwards - the EU, and recently the US, shutting down, hitting the global supply chains again, this time on the demand side.)

Since you mention web comparisons, imagine your lead dev announces that to improve redundancy, the project shall use both React and Angular for the same application. "This way, if one of the dependencies shuts down, we'll already be partly using the other dependency! What could possibly go wrong?"

This makes no sense, because the only reason React would suddenly fail on you is if your project is so very badly engineered that you don't pin dependencies and cache them locally. And even then, your deployed instances would remain unaffected.

A dependency is something you own (a checked-out copy of). A better comparison is with services. So you may be using a payment gateway in your product, and maybe you need just a single one - but at the very minimum, you should have a plan in place to switch to a different one at a moment's notice. That's reasonable redundancy.

I think I've come up with an analogy for demand-side supply chain issues though. Imagine you have a web service that's constantly under 90% load during normal operations, and that eats almost exactly as much money in the infrastructure costs as it earns. Imagine that service gets mentioned on Hacker News. It almost immediately fails due to increased demand, you can't provision new instances because you don't have enough money in the bank, and then when suddenly the demand drops, you can't afford to keep it on at all.

Only a series of very bad decision would cause the above scenario to happen, and yet it's almost exactly like how supply chains operate in physical space.

We could easily imagine that suddenly it is revealed that React contains some super-well-hidden malware that phones home to Facebook, and that's been built into React since early versions. As doubtful as that sounds, it's actually not unlike recent scares about China embedding secret transmitters deep inside of circuitboards, etc.

Again, you own your code dependencies[0]. A patch would be quickly released by software security experts, which every half-competent developer could apply to their product on their own. That's the benefit of ownership - you get to fix things. With software, you don't even need spare parts.

Depending on services is where the fragility starts. They're single points of failure, unless you have a plan to quickly switch to an equivalent competitor.

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[0] - Unless they have a time-limited commercial license. Then they're essentially a service.

Doing globalism "right" requires that there are no borders at all, so it would be solved in exactly the same manner as if the factories and the supplies were in two different corners of Country X.

We are also not getting there anytime soon.

Nah. Europe, most of the liberal world, are ready and recognize people add value.

I think the thing is that people are /never/ ready for changes even if they actually prepare and waiting for to "be ready first" is to wait forever and get even less ready over time.

> People emigrate from places with problems, then insist the place they immigrated to should be like the place they emigrated from.

the majority of the time, the problems you speak of were caused by the big western powers in the first place

I think that comment was about Californians moving to other states.

Well that's kinda rich. California does a remarkably good job of integrating people from distant lands. Only thing that grates is people from other states coming here and demanding the government be as shitty and regressive as the one they left behind. Frankly that's something foreign immigrants typically don't do.

Lots of writing in international relations circles right now about how the slapshod global response to this crisis, in contrast to previous pandemics like ebola and H1N1, is evidence that the era of US hegemony is over. Without a hegemonic entity putting its imprimatur on what the "right way" to do things is, everything ends up being kind of a mess.

I guess we can look forward to Chinese hegemony in the future, since the US doesn't want to do it any more.

Maybe. But there's a lot of doubt as to whether China is cut out to exercise broad hegemonic influence the way the US has. They might not have the cultural cachet or a compelling enough ideological framework for international cooperation the way America's Wilsonian institutionalism was. It's more likely we're heading for a more chaotic and unstable multi-polar world.

Coordination (or cooperation) only works up to a point. If resources are truly scarce, then being selfish may be the only way to survive no matter what century you’re in.

If resources are truly scarce, then competition means most players won't survive - whatever resources they manage to hoard for themselves won't be enough for their needs. Cooperation means more will be saved.

(A simple thought experiment: imagine there are 10 equally capable competitors, each needing 2 units of resources to survive, and there are only 10 available globally. Under cooperation, 5 competitors will need to be sacrificed, but 5 will live. Under competition, all 10 will perish, each holding their hard-won single unit of resources.)

If you can figure out how to turn off the part of people’s brains that wants to avoid them being part of the 5 to be sacrificed, you will have created world peace.

Otherwise, this is what peaceful cooperation looks like (I’ll give you this in exchange for that, where obviously the one with more desireable goods or services to trade will survive).

>If you can figure out how to turn off the part of people’s brains that wants to avoid them being part of the 5 to be sacrificed, you will have created world peace.

Most cultures have very strong social mores that sanction against hoarding or even general unwillingness to share. It's not THAT beyond the pale. What makes it hard is when society becomes disconnected enough, and community bonds get weak enough that social mores no longer bind behavior.

Under competition, one or two will survive by killing off the rest.

And from the perspective of the victors, it will be a better result, because winning guaranteed survival, whereas cooperation is essentially a lottery. So anybody who has a better chances to win a conflict than a lottery would choose conflict, if they are deciding solely on utilitarian rather than ethical grounds.

Why then have nations?

There are places where even posing this question - at least if it clearly applies to the corresponding nation - is extremist speech. Nations, like all other corporations, are like organisms themselves. They might still act beneficial to their population, but never at the cost of their own survival.

Nations were useful, particularly when almost all problems were local problems. Doesn't mean it's an ideal top-level organization for XXI century.

You have bodies like Germany or the US, which function as a federation of states. Looking at Germany and EU, you essentially have states within a state within a sort-of state. You can stack governments recursively, so it's possible and in some ways desirable to have a single one at the top level.

> It's surprising because one would think that in XXI century, people understood that global problems require global coordination; competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

More globalists isn't going to solve globalism.

American politicians answer to their constituants, not the China or India. If it looks like policitians didn't first and foremost prioritize the need of their own citizens who elected them then it's treason.

> competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

The irony, it's the very definition of economic liberalism and what led to the current paradigm, globalism. The pandemic is only global because trade is global and people can easily travel between countries.

So no the solution isn't "a world government", the solution is to take back western industrial force from China.

Today, This is just the bill coming due, this is the real cost of the last 40 years of western industrial policies.

> The irony, it's the very definition of economic liberalism and what led to the current paradigm, globalism.

It doesn't mean it's the only path to a global economy.

> The pandemic is only global because trade is global and people can easily travel between countries.

The pandemic wouldn't be anywhere near as severe if there was a coordinated global response.

> the solution is to take back western industrial force from China

For that, you'll have to shut down economic liberalism, because otherwise the forces that caused the move of western industrial force into China will still be present, and will cause it again once the public forgets about the pandemic (i.e. in a year), and beancounters everywhere will be free to optimize the corporate balance sheets once again.

Even with China lying at the beginning of the pandemic, there were then whole two months when the rest of the world watched it spread and didn't do anything to protect themselves. The severity of the pandemic is not China's fault.

I'm not sure I follow.

The rest of the world was acting with the (false) information that China, and the WHO, were putting out there - including that there was "no evidence of human-to-human" transmission. So perhaps when you say it's "not China's fault", this is technically true in the sense that it's the fault of the rest of us for taking what were obvious lies at face value.

At the end of January, it was obvious that it's a severely infectious disease. On 22th of January WHO agreed that there is evidence of human-to-human transmission[0]. By the end of January, the virus was in Italy. By mid-February, it was clear it's going to be a problem for the West. By the end of February, it was obvious to anyone with half a brain and access to a spreadsheet that this is going to be a devastating global pandemic unless swift and extreme actions are taken.

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[0] - https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/08-04-2020-who-timeline...

>At the end of January, it was obvious that it's a severely infectious disease.

>By mid-February, it was clear it's going to be a problem for the West.

Which I'm sure is why it took the WHO until March 11th to declare it a Pandemic. This entire timeline reads like a corporate CYA exercise. Which tracks, since it was created yesterday.

WHO claimed throughout that border restrictions were useless yet 80% of coronavirus cases in Canada on March 14th were directly connected to international travel. That's a whole incubation period after you say it was obviously going to be a problem.

Every time the Canadian government was asked why they weren't doing anything more, they would reply that they were following all WHO recommendations and WHO says no border closures.

Of course, it's impossible to tell what would have happened if WHO had recommended border closures but since they didn't, it's all on them.

Except in this case the only countries that got out unscathed took unilateral action rather than listening to the recommendations of the corrupt multi national organizations that are supposedly trying to protect global public health.

In a way. WHO was way too cautious and severely underplayed the issue in January and February, but even then, the small recommendations they did make were completely ignored by the entire Western world.

> In a way

In a way? Taiwan has less than 350 cases. They didn't wait for the WHO recommendation. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die because of greed and bureaucratic incompetence.

Giant centralized institutions are not the solution to humanities' ills and dealing and cooperating with corrupt foreign powers isn't either.

The reason that the flight attendants tell you to put on your own mask before helping others is so you CAN help others, otherwise everybody dies.

Wether it cleanly fits into your political ideology or not, The United States is the most powerful country in the world, and in the coming years as less powerful countries work to stamp this out, we are going to be doing a lot to help them.

As the US goes, so goes the world. The US restricting medical supply exports looks bad on the short term, but it will end up being a net benefit to the planet.

> Wether it cleanly fits into your political ideology or not, The United States is the most powerful country in the world

It's not a matter of my ideology. I recognize that the US was the most powerful country in the world before the pandemic, but looking at the news about the US response, I have a feeling it will no longer be once the coronavirus is finally dealt with. Then again, maybe I'm just biased by the disproportionate amount of headlines the US is taking in international media.

If the US is not the most powerful country then who is? The US has the strongest economy and the strongest military. What other measure are you looking at? Even if you want to look at Europe as a single country then that would be debatable. UK just left and its looking like there is growing support for Spain and Poland to leave. It looks like the EU may be falling apart.

I think you need to look at individual US states vs the US as a whole. The federal government doesn't really have authority to do everything that other country's federal governments do. For example its generally accepted that the federal government cannot force every citizen to be in lockdown while the states can.

The US is extremely divided. Even in these times the political class and society could not get over their differences.

The lack of a social net and out of control capitalism are also massive issues.

The president was downplaying the virus.

The US doesn't look like the most powerful country in the world, nor as a leader.

Who looks like most powerful country then?

Well it's pretty obvious that China is vying for the position, and the likeliest to achieve it.

In the long term, perhaps. But US is still dominant today, and that will not suddenly change next year - the gap is just too great.

Besides, China would need to grow its power a lot to even be able to fit the same tier that US does today. And if they can't or don't want to, then the end result is likely a more decentralized world. Not every era is "Pax ..." - there are long gaps in between the fall of the old empire and the rise of a new one.

China has shitty positioning too. USA was positioned to be a beacon of freedom since it's founding. Meanwhile China is position as what... Authoritarian country that loves to slaughter it's citizens in various ways? That's not exactly a great idea to sell to the world. The only way China can get on top is by holding the rest of the world hostage. Either by military or commerce backed by military. But as all relationships built on fear, that'd be quite a fragile position.

China's positioning is rapid growth and "social harmony". I'm not saying that they actually deliver on this, but that's how it's being sold.

That's their selling point for country managers and boy do they deliver. But it's not that interesting for the general population. Very few people want rapid growth and "social harmony" by themselves.

You'd be surprised, actually. This is more true in third world countries, and other areas that have experienced instability relatively recently (e.g. ex-USSR countries, including Russia) - at some point people start demanding a "strong hand" and whatnot.

Fun thing is, I am from ex-USSR country.

People still remember Soviet-style "social harmony" and there's a big allergy for that path.

Rapid growth is not exactly popular too for multiple reasons.

Growth-over-ecology brings bad memories from soviet era

Growth-over-labour-rights brings bad memories from 90s and somewhat soviet era

Rapid change itself brings bad memories from 90s and 00s too

Trying to become one doesn't make you one. China is a long long long way to go.

OP was claiming "The US doesn't look like the most powerful country in the world, nor as a leader.". If US doesn't count for him.. I'd say China is 3rd world country compared to US.

What are you seeing the suggests that the US is anything other than almost comically more powerful than any other country in the world?

In terms of military might, yes. In terms of economy? We'll see when the pandemic passes. The thing I see is US being too slow to react to COVID-19 threat and its economy being probably one of the most fragile (because of being most market-optimized).