“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then farce.”
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Saw this today, and it reinforces that “after the virus” could be a long time coming:
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The one thing I can foresee happening and that I am terrified of is flights becoming unaffordable or too obnoxious to bother with. I have just moved to a different country at the beginning of this year. It is going great here but all my family and friends are a 2 hour’s flight away and my friends have been from all over Europe even before this. Right now I can live with the missed visits and I actually have more contact with people via video chat than ever before, but I moved here with the knowledge that my life back home is always just a small expense and three quarters of a day’s travel away. That security is crumbling now.
I know that cheap air travel is not a great idea and everything but nonetheless it was the system we operated under and that I based my decision making on.
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A 2-hour flight is a driveable distance, as long as there are no oceans involved. And I think high-speed trains will increase in the coming years (for example, the one planned connecting Paris and Amsterdam).
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It does look like intelligent life is already getting scarce.
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The fjords and the ferry complicate the whole issue. It would be a two day trip by car or train.
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Ah, yes, that does make a difference!
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Ease of travel is part of what got us into this mess. Expensive air fares might have prevented hordes of people in this country from partying in Ischgl, or college students from all over the USA from doing the same in Miami. While poor people are disproportionately suffering from the pandemic, it was brought to them by jetsetters.
I’m currently having trouble finding a safe route home to Honolulu so I sympathize with your concerns, but there is also virtue in travel not being so easy.
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Broadly, there appear to be two competing visions. One favors a return to the status quo ante, a restoration of the old evils for the continued benefit of a tiny minority confident in their ability to ride out the coming climate cataclysm and escape the coming plagues. The other sees the potential for ‘cascading transformations’ that might lead to greater equality, opportunity and increased well-being for the majority in a world that eschews fossil fuels, moderates the escalating impacts of global warming and pulls back from rapacious habitat destruction and its concomitant exposure to novel zoonotic diseases. Recent history suggests the former vision, with little or no consideration of the latter, will prevail. The moment of clarity, expressed in climate and consciousness, will pass and progressives will resume their regular, but now carefully washed, handwringing.
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As what we have today will influence what we will have tomorrow:
Carl Miller is the author of The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab and has travelled extensively to meet those disrupting civil society out of all recognisable form in politics, business, media and policing.
Enjoy Carl’s lecture presentation, above, where he shines a light into the darkest corners of the internet for your listening pleasure (or alarm) to discover what has become of political legitimacy and authority.
Co-founder and research director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at left-leaning think tank Demos, Carl takes you on a tour of industrial fake-news outlets, grass-roots political disruption and he goes inside the topsy turvy world of Russia’s hybrid war that uses disinformation, sock puppets, and fake news to wrong-foot the liberal West.
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As coronavirus catches tech CEOs with their pants down, IBM’s Ginni Rometty warns of IT’s new role post-pandemic
Last night, one of the most senior figures in the IT industry from one of the biggest companies gave the strongest indication that when COVID-19 lockdowns gradually begin to lift, people will not return to the jobs they once had. That means both tech jobs, and how technology supports other business roles.
Speaking to BBC Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, Ginni Rometty, former CEO and current executive chairman of IBM, said companies would notice there is a “fair amount of middle management” that “perhaps” they don’t need. The resulting restructure would push forward transformation supported by IT.
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I just can’t, I don’t, What the fuck is she thinking!?!?!?! 
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Basically, one thing: “Me me me me me me …”
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“Study the past, if you would divine the future.” Confucius
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She probably isn’t and that’s the problem.
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The pandemic’s long term impact will be an additional new incentive to automate work production and services. Business leaders have recognized the displacement of human labor by robotics for some time. Tesla co-founder and SpaceX founder Elon Musk told the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017, “There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better (than a human). These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.” To mitigate this trend other billionaires are promoting a tax on robots.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told online publication Quartz, that if a robot replaces a human worker, there should be a tax on robotics to offset automation’s societal effect. Gates said that replacing human labor with machines can have a positive impact if it frees up people to use their human empathy and understanding to help the many who need help to survive and enjoy life. However, the money to allow them to assist the larger community needs to come “from the profits that are generated by the labor-saving efficiency there; some can come directly in some kind of robot tax.”
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