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> “it doesn’t feel safer.”

> This conversation is usually about how no one lets their kids play outside unsupervised anymore,

Those two show overall fear is higher, not that reasonable fear is higher.

There's so much in current society that sells fear, that I'm not surprised. FOMO for the next Musk stock promotion. Stalkers, scammers, pedophiles. Burglar alarms being sold with a subscription at 70% profit margins (Verisure here in Sweden.) I recently calculated that I'd pay about $300k-600k in fees for every actual burglary where I live. The insurance deductible is way way lower than that, and I doubt they'd actually change the outcome. Incidentally, insurance companies care about water and fire damage, not burglary. But the scary marketing video with masked men in your garage sells well...

Of course, insurance is a a whole other chapter on selling fear. Sometimes warranted, mostly not. The Freetrailer app, used to book and pay for trailers, defaults to me paying for a deductibility reduction. With a big fat warning if I remove that, that if something happens, I might be liable for up to $700!

Not to mention the economy is always just one bad quarter away from a 1929 crash.

I blame media (new and old) for the fearmongering that sells my attention on low probability outcomes.



I'm glad you mentioned the economy.

Money is a form of communication.

The internet has enabled essentially instant communication between any two or more parties anywhere on the planet.

The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one, with less warning, and the impact will be more widespread.

Or ...

We'll all see it coming ahead of time, behave perfectly rationally, and avoid the crisis entirely.

Based on how we handled 9/11, and spent 20 years and $20 trillion to get 1 guy, im preparing for the former, not the later, because most people are not rational in the face of a crisis.


> The next 1929 is going to happen faster than the last one

For sure, and for reasons we can't imagine today.

I sometimes think about nuclear accidents. It seems very unlikely that we've already seen the worst accident that will ever be. Same goes for so many technologies less than 100 years old. Safety standards need to go up in parity with the scaling up to keep MTBF in check. Given what I've seen of human greed, I hold only partial hope that'll happen as energy demands increase. Hopefully batteries, wind, solar and regulatory oversight are enough.




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