Sublime

In any case, Ferguson’s prediction for the flu proved even more incorrect than his mad cow estimate. A total of forty-three people died from the H5N1 flu in 2005, according to the WHO, meaning Ferguson was off by a factor of millions.17 Yet Ferguson only became more important in the years that followed.

As a result, the United States and Europe chose arguably the worst possible path—lockdowns that damaged their economies, shut schools, and made many people depressed and fearful while increasing in-home transmission.

Os economistas costumam mencionar o Princípio 80/20,3 que é a ideia de que, em qualquer situação, cerca de 80% do “trabalho” é feito por 20% dos participantes. Na maioria das sociedades, 20% dos criminosos cometem 80% dos crimes. Vinte por cento dos motoristas causam 80% de todos os acidentes. Vinte por cento dos bebedores de cerveja tomam 80% de t

“If we aren’t able to set aside some personal freedoms to keep a million or more people from dying needlessly from a novel virus, and to keep our health care system from imploding, then heaven help us when climate change hits and the economy crumbles due to our hitting a series of environmental limits.”55

The small-world networks found everywhere, described in the Watts-Strogatz paper, have an intriguing feature. They are both unusually robust and unusually fragile. They are robust against random attacks or random failures. Which is why random server outages, for example, have little effect on internet traffic. But they are especially vulnerable to

at their end there might be another pandemic, even worse than the one we are experiencing today; and because their origin, as remote as it may