[soylentcola]

Can't you say this for most things, though? People talked about the likelihood of a new contagious respiratory viral pandemic for years. Plans were drawn up, warnings were made, and the response was mostly "uh huh, that would suck for sure". Same could be said about anyone who's ever had their data lost to malware or hardware failure and didn't have a proper backup in place.

On some level I think it's human nature to underestimate some types of risk (and the nature of businesses to optimize for profit based on an understanding of this nature).

[ashtonkem]

There’s a big difference between “there might be a pandemic at some point in the indeterminate future” and “the price of 7 day gas futures is rising rapidly”. There’s also a difference between “Texas’ grid might fail in a future freeze” and “there will be a bad freeze next week”.

It doesn’t make sense to try and draw a parallel between a bad hypothetical that might happen in some indeterminate future and a negative possibility that will either come to pass or fizzle within a very short time horizon.