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There is a downside to steel reinforcing bars: they rust. The second most remarkable thing about the sudden collapse of the Florida condo building was the rush to assure everyone that this was a one-off catastrophe: all the factors fingered as causes were unique to this building, the implication being all other high-rise reinforced concrete condos without the exact same mix of causal factors were not in danger.

Star Wars 24 plus the novelized version, amusement park ride, podcast, action figure and OnlyFans pages, anyone? I happened to be in a Big Box Emporium, buying two bags of whole wheat flour, when a strange revelation struck me: almost nothing in this giant emporium was made in the USA.

What’s striking about our thought experiment is how little reliable data we have about the transmissibility of our hypothetical and the long-term consequences of its mutations. Let’s run a thought experiment on a hypothetical virus we’ll call Virus Z, a run-of-the-mill respiratory variety not much different from other viruses which are 1) very small; 2) mutate rapidly and 3) infect human cells and modify the cellular machinery to produce more viral particles.