I was just on the phone with a friend and I made a joke about how kids today wouldn't know weather existed.

Then I told him about how there was a novel, I think it was Foundation, where the planet was so overgrown with buildings that kids had to be brought to the roof https://twitter.com/cheskoo/status/1264206285622448128

before they were a certain age, otherwise they'd go insane the first time they saw the sky. I told him the premise of the novel was that psychology was so advanced that the leaders recognized that a crisis that would send the galaxy into chaos for 100,000 years was imminent.

Their plan of action was to force an intentional crisis because that would only cause chaos for a thousand years.

We both agreed that that wasn't that engaging a premise - I'm not sure I even finished Foundation.

Yet, and some of you see where this is going already, later

in the conversation, we discussed how the difficulty in fixing the economy is that we were likely on the verge of a recession anyway. We discussed whether this crash might enable us to recover more quickly than the otherwise protracted recession that might have happened.

Can we go from now-ish to recovery and skip the long decline that would have happened in absence of the lockdown? (Not saying that this is a fact, just a brainstorm speculation - perhaps government intervention could have helped either way, but without the crisis,

we'd be resistant to allowing it, leaving longer decline/recovery cycle). But the point is, I suddenly realized that we had unintentionally applied the plot of the book we were discussing to real life - one we had agreed was far-fetched.