Where are all the containers? The global shortage explained

Re:Where are all the containers? The global shortage explained by kalleboo on Thursday March 25, 2021 @09:34AM (#26580032)

You have to remember that before COVID19, we had SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu. All of these were huge news panics, lots of people got scared and started prepping for the end of the world, but for people in the west it largely ended up a nothing-burger. In the early days it's hard to know how bad something really is. Especially with the early info out of China being so unreliable (e.g. all those videos of people randomly falling down in public)

But once it hit Italy bad, there were no more excuses.

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Re:Where are all the containers? The global shortage explained by mbg721 on Thursday March 25, 2021 @11:01AM (#26581117)

Of course, next time there's a disease that turns out to be a nothing-burger, the early incentive for politicians is going to be to overreact rather than underreact. If emergency-fatigue seems bad now, I don't think we've seen anything yet.

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Re:Where are all the containers? The global shortage explained by robomartin on Thursday March 25, 2021 @11:26AM (#26581420)

I think, I hope, what we'll do is pay attention to people like Dr. Fauci and ignore politicians insisting that "it's just like the flu, we are ready for this, go about your lives as normal". That is, quite literally, the level of dysfunction we experienced; the federal government yelling "Danger Will Robinson" and the entirety of the media and one political party saying "Ignore them, they are just being racist". And here we are.

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Re:Where are all the containers? The global shortage explained by robomartin on Thursday March 25, 2021 @10:29AM (#26580723)

Of course. Yet, when the President of the US gets on TV and announces that the administration enacted a travel ban from all of China...well, politicians, regardless of their ideological alignment, should stop talking and consider why this "full tilt" move was necessary.

At the time this was going on they were trying to impeach Trump. This means that the entire Democratic party and nearly the entire media could not bring themselves into alignment with him at all. They were trying to kill the guy. How could they turn around and say: "Yes, sir. What do you need us to do?".

And so the nation paid the price.

This virus showed the US and the world just how dysfunctional our system of government has become. It has also demonstrated how dangerously partisan and politically-driven our mass media turns out to be. All to the detriment of the nation and the world.

Imagine what we could have accomplished if they actually worked together.

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