In 2011 almost 1k people died after heavy rains in Brazil that caused a whole valley to be flooded (surrounding mountain ranges canalized massive amounts of rainfall into it).
On Street View it is possible to see how high the water went, by looking at the stains in the walls https://www.google.com/maps/@-22.3974509,-43.0875373,3a,26.2...
Sadly the region is repopulated again - a mix of people building houses to rent to unaware folks, people unwilling to leave behind decades of work, and general faith that they will survive if that's God's will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2011_Rio_de_Janeiro_fl...
People have moved into houses built on the "Love Canal" toxic dump in Niagara unaware of its history as probably the worst toxic waste catastrophe in the US:
Seattle turned a creosote saturated lakefront area into a city park. And then had to shut it down within a year, scrape all the topsoil off to a deeper depth and replace it.
There are actual creosote superfund sites in Puget Sound, from railroad tie manufacture. For some reason the gasworks weren’t one, even though they are a point source of the stuff.
> Seattle turned a creosote saturated lakefront area into a city park. And then had to shut it down within a year, scrape all the topsoil off to a deeper depth and replace it.
You're missing the part where it has been reopened for decades.
I assume by “reopened” you mean closed and reopened repeatedly? Yeah I moved a while ago and didn’t hear the comedy of errors continues. Looks like they’re thinking of dredging an area of lake union twice the size of the park?
It's entirely possible I'm wrong about this, and I missed an environmental closure, could you find a news article for it?
Yes, there's definitely a comedy of errors when it comes to remediating the site. I believe that there's a 2027 dredging plan.
As I understand it, the consensus is that the environmental danger largely lies in the buried waste poisoning the waterways, and the watertable, not picnic-goers. Am I wrong? Is the consensus wrong?
In the southern Midwest and in a few of the arid states, there are areas where flash flooding is a problem. In a heavy rainstorm, the shape of the watershed is such that most of the water shows up at a river or stream bed as a concentrated pulse. That can be particularly dangerous in a seasonal stream bed, because you are more likely to have people in a dry stream bed than a wet one. Of course you also have the problem of people crossing a dry bed and not being able to cross back until the rains stop.
There are some famous videos of people getting caught by flash floods in the Middle East as well. The return of the rains seems to have become a spectator sport and people get too close.
> Aneyoshi’s tsunami stone is the only one found that explicitly describes where to build houses
As for others, “Some act as monuments, giving death tolls from past tsunamis or marking mass graves of the victims. Others offer more direct advice. A tsunami stone in Kesennuma, a city in the Miyagi Prefecture, reads: ‘Always be prepared for unexpected tsunamis. Choose life over your possessions and valuables.’” - source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tsunami-stones
Note that tsunami stones, except one, are not markers of danger, at least not in a precise, spatial sense. They’re like memorial plaques, listing past casualties or marking gravesites. See grandparent comment.
> "It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and their grandchildren, but then the memory fades,"
Some similarities to lessons from the 1918 flu epidemic that we relearned in 2020. We should build some "COVID stones" so we don't forget.
> The rise of nazism in America says we are already too late.
This isn't a new thing, unfortunately.
Given that the KKK has been around for 100+ years — and the fact that the Eugenics movement really started in the United States[1] (so clearly so that Hitler mentions it in Mein Kampf), Nazism & Hyper-Nationalism have been in and out of fashion for over a century and we are still here.
Yep. This is the average societal memory horizon. The absolute cultural memory horizon tends to be roughly 250 years (10 generations) as that's about when most civilizations fail. At least once every generation, there is a moral or cultural test event that pushes that civilization writ large closer to disorder or makes it stronger by recovery, preparedness, and prevention.
I see the opposite. A nation state aggressively attempted to take over another, and the world reacted swiftly and largely in unison. The lesson seems learned, at least for now. If the lesson had been lost, everyone would have done nothing.
The western world. Don't forget that the early economic sanctions were largely ignored by the BRICS countries, which make up ~45% of the world's population.
The world reacted swiftly... And then the war continued. Had West reacted swiftly with it's shear power, the war would have ended 2 years ago. But it's still going on. And situation is getting dire for Ukraine. Too little ammo is supplied. New options of guns are approved too late. West could have helped to close airspace at least in West Ukraine, but that's not happening either. All sorts of sanctions are repeatedly broken with the help of „global south“ and our own greedy corrupted actors.
The only lesson here is (core)West cannot be trusted and you're on it's own. At least this is the lesson I learned living 30km from (pseudo)Russia border.
Both "half" and "rooting" are exaggerations. No need for that. But yes, a depressing number of one party's politicians are willing to use Ukraine foreign policy as a domestic division issue.
I do not feel that is an exaggeration whatsoever. About half of Americans would prefer to see Russia win the war. I think I'm getting downvoted for speaking the plain truth.
>More than eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaners (88%) and Republicans and Republican leaners (85%) favor keeping strict economic sanctions on Russia. And at least six-in-ten in each party strongly favor maintaining strict sanctions (68% of Democrats, 61% of Republicans).
Chart shows Democrats much more supportive of admitting Ukrainian refugees to the U.S. than are Republicans
>Similar shares of Republicans (75%) and Democrats (81%) favor keeping a large military presence in NATO countries located near Ukraine. And there is limited support among both Republicans and Democrats for taking military action, even if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia: About a third of the public (35%) and nearly identical shares of Democrats (35%) and Republicans (36%) favor this.
> About half of Americans would prefer to see Russia win the war.
My brother in pro-democracy, you are literally exaggerating right now. If half the US adult population people really wanted Russia to conquer Ukraine, you would be able to easily cite polls showing it in rather stark terms.
Yes, it's definitely become a red/blue partisan issue, and yes, Republican "leadership" needs to be raked over the coals for their extended support for the Emperor's New Clothes, and yes, if Russia won they'd probably make up a bunch of "this is fine" nonsense... However!--Even if you assumed every single person of any party who thought "the US gives too much aid" was actually a crypto-Putinist hiding their dark desires for an outright Russian victory... Well, that's still only 37%. [0]
That far-reaching assumption almost certainly wrong through, especially since general sentiment toward Russia has almost hit rock-bottom. [1] That's why nobody even bothers polling for "which country would your rather see win."
The Fourth Turning and his newer one, The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe goes into this phenomenon and how it shapes society and humanity. It's roughly 80 years in length and covers 4 generations of archetypes. Every society, every culture, everywhere for as long as we know...
I think cycles of forgetting run faster these days. A whole bunch of cows in Texas have H5N1 flu now, and they're not stopping them from selling the cows, so they're now infecting herds in other states. Just yesterday a dairy worker in Texas came down with H5N1.
I came out of it fine. I wish some other people had learned:
- That a respiratory disease can spread quickly before you show symptoms, and kill millions
- That even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things
- That you don't get to defect from polite society one day and then whine about being an outcast the next. Of course I'm mad at people who refused to take any precautions at all. They made things worse.
Chaos helps no one. It’s why even the democratic world has martial law.
We may be wrong together but at least we are together. Having people running in three directions at once will get everyone killed in wartime or disaster. Once the avalanche starts it is too late for the pebbles to vote.
I strongly disagree; People have agency, rocks and geological forces do not.
>We may be wrong together but at least we are together.
Is a great way to get everyone killed.
We, in the west love to tout how our diversity and free thinking makes us better than those who do not have those values. What I saw were a bunch of countries that wished they could rule the populace in the same manner as China and Saudi Arabia.
If we can not uphold our values when we face difficulties, then they are not values.
You speak of martial law and preventing chaos. Envision the outcry and response if Trump had enacted such a policy in early February when members of the Democratic Party were encouraging people to gather in crowds to show support for Chinese New Year?
While there's plenty of blame to go around for the government's disinformation campaign, never forget that the entire cast of FauxNews personalities were decrying the initial cautionary stance as a politically motivated hoax and then turned around and changed their tune when it didn't turnout to be a dud like SARS 1.0.
I'm not so sure. To me it seems people just could not stand masks to the point it actually created ongoing planetary scale mental health crisis. :shrug:.
> That even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things
They weren't right during the pandemic though. From initially refusing to acknowledge the situation to lying and cohercing people into taking untested injections whose side effects on the population remain unknown, and of course censoring and character assassinating anyone who dared rise any objections against its conduct. And lets not forget actively avoiding finding out the origin of the virus because it wasn't politically convenient during an election year.
In this context, do you consider "even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things" more informative than misinformative?
To disprove "That even though the government is wrong a lot, sometimes they're right about important things", you would have to prove that the government is wrong _all_ the time about important things. You just mentioned some things you think the government got wrong, but that is covered by the clause "That even though the government is wrong a lot" anyway. So it then just seems you wanted to soapbox about covid and governments, even if that isn't your intent.
In the context "lessons we learned from covid that we shouldn't forget", "the government is sometimes right about important things" cannot be one of them without specifics on what is it they supposedly got right.
Reasonable at first. Once it was known that the virus is transmitted via aerosols then forcing masks was the wrong thing to do, specially on children. Useless and damaging.
> minimizing in-person interactions
What benefit did it achieve? As a quarantine it was too leaky and it also led to mass psychological distress.
> funding medical research
What medical research? For some reason, the most obvious approach, repurposed drugs, was nowhere in sight. If anything demonizing it was the official policy (ie. the smear campaign against ivermectin).
> Reasonable at first. Once it was known that the virus is transmitted via aerosols then forcing masks was the wrong thing to do, specially on children. Useless and damaging.
And that's the reason we have governments for. So that people like you can't do unlimited damage. You can privately hate the government, but as long as you follow the rules, the damage is contained.
> this paper does not estimate the effect of wearing masks, but rather the effect of mandating mask wearing
This study doesn't control its variables properly. Places with no mask mandates are also places where people typicaly didn't take other precautions such as avoiding mass gatherings.
Anecdotally, when my son was in online classes and later on in person but masked he made remarks to me about how he felt like he had no friends and people didn't like him.
Partially(mostly?) was because during class breaks they were not allowed to interact.
"The hypotheses for the influence of face mask wearing on emotion recognition were partially supported. Results showed that whereas anger was better recognized, happiness and sadness were impaired in their recognition.
...
Therefore, the differential impact of face masks on emotion recognition can have an effect on children’s social interactions. For example, better recognition of anger can facilitate greater physical and social distance from one another (Calbi et al., 2021). On the other hand, lower recognition of happiness and sadness can be potentially detrimental for children’s social interactions. Happiness has been identified as key to boosting social interactions (Quoidbach et al., 2019), whereas recognizing sadness in others is important to display appropriate interpersonal emotion regulation (Kwon & López-Pérez, 2022)."
> You can privately hate the government, but as long as you follow the rules, the damage is contained.
Please state in quantitative (percentage) terms what "the damage is contained" means at object level reality.
Also please state the source(s) of this knowledge (this way it makes it explicit whether what you are describing is your opinion vs facts, as you seem to be presenting it as).
Let's check out the language from the link you did include:
>> Our results imply that...
>> This suggests that...
Wow, that's a neat trick. Is science not THE institution that we can turn to for non-misinformative information? I always hear that it is LITERALLY THE BEST at discovering and distributing truth, but then I constantly encounter this sort of thing, and rarely anything else.
Does this situation seem strange to you, even in the slightest?
You expect your opponents to cite sources and provide such nuance at your demand, but you have not reciprocated that patience. It is so easy when you foist expectations on others then wonder why people don't want you engage with you, then claim it is the science that is wrong.
So is what you are doing. I'd say your approach is even easier.
> when you foist expectations on others
I've foisted no expectations, I have only posed some questions or requests for clarifying detail regarding your facts.
Please do not misrepresent reality, it is rude, and can be harmful. If you would like others to be concerned about the safety of the collective, you should reciprocate.
> then wonder why people don't want you engage with you
Do you believe yourself to know why people don't want to engage with me, or that I wonder about such things? How could you possibly acquire such knowledge?
> then claim it is the science that is wrong.
I made no such claim (though, I did criticize the questionably accurate memetic reputation and marketing of "science", the institution that proclaims in their scriptures and marketing (though not so much in behavior) to welcome all criticism), why are you speaking as if I have? Are you perhaps "trying" (I use quotes, as it may seem like I am implying conscious intent, which I am not) to trick people into believing something that is not true, are you perhaps at least to some degree engaging in rhetoric in order to persuade other people to believe your preferred story?
Not really. This was the first widely deployed modified adenovirus vaccine. Not the first developed, but if I'm remembering correctly, none of the others made it out of trials.
"noun
1.
a substance used to stimulate immunity to a particular infectious disease or pathogen"
Vaccines activate immunity against specific pathogens, reducing infection severity and transmission risk. COVID-19 vaccines decrease disease severity and transmission probability.
This whole thing of "they arent vaccines" is bologna and everyone knows it
"Vaccine" is actually a pretty broad term and loses usefulness in these conversations outside of its use as a rhetorical tool. Yes MRNA vaccines are vaccines and yes they are different from other types of vaccine such as Live-attenuated vaccines, conjugate vaccines and others.
They're also by design inferior to other vaccines since they only target one specific antigen, rendering them useless very quickly against highly mutagenic viruses (like coronaviruses).
The quick adaptability of mRNA vaccines to new variants is a key advantage, not a weakness.
Their rapid development and adaptability make them probably the best type of vaccine for fighting quickly mutating viruses. This is shown by the rapidity and relative ease of development and deployment of bivalent vaccines. mRNA vaccines are one of the great technological triumphs of the American industry and science apparatus.
"The results suggest that the significant effect of ivermectin on survival was dependent on largely poor-quality studies. ... This highlights the need for rigorous quality assessments, for authors to share patient-level data, and for efforts to avoid publication bias for registered studies. These steps are vital to facilitate accurate conclusions on clinical treatments."
More specifically, to your point, and the research you cite, what actually appears to be happening:
> [patients] who were infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (five with AIDS-defining conditions) and harbored Strongyloides stercoralis received ivermectin on a compassionate basis for persistent intestinal infection.
Strongyloides. A _parasite_.
I hate the "I did my research" trope and everything surrounding it.
Is "extremely well-tested" an objective scientific term (as opposed to a subjective personal opinion)? If so, please link to an authoritative definition.
> and anyone saying they weren't is either lying or was lied to by a liar.
Not necessarily, they could simply be speaking subjectively, speaking untruthfully/misinformatively etc... hey, kind of like you are doing right now!
Aren't humans interesting when they try to practice logic? Let's hope our Dear Leaders and The Experts (including The Scientists) took some classes before they tried to pull it off under extremely difficult circumstances, in a problem space containing thousands/millions of variables, many of them hallucinated (but not realized as such, because science does not study that in a really serious way).
Do you think that they have? And if not, do you think this is something we should perhaps include in these highly intellectual conversations?
> The vaccines were extremely well-tested and anyone saying they weren't is either lying or was lied to by a liar.
Starting human trials before animal trials were finished is not what I'd call "extremely well-tested".
The standard testing procedure takes years. These injections were forced upon hundreds of millions of people after only a few months of testing, and that's even assuming that what little testing was done was done properly.
> Starting human trials before animal trials were finished is not what I'd call "extremely well-tested".
Citation needed. The FDA paperwork to authorize human trials and emergency authorization referenced the completed animal trials.
> The standard testing procedure takes years.
While testing processes do typically take years, this also factors in the production to testable levels of said vaccines, whereas mRNA vaccines are far more quickly and efficiently produced, reducing this time dramatically.
Also to be taken into account, work on coronavirus vaccination in humans had already been in the pipeline since the Avian Flu crises. This wasn't something new.
> These injections were forced upon hundreds of millions of people after only a few months of testing
Most people couldn't access the vaccine for much longer periods of time. Certainly no-one was being forced early on (and that goes for varying definitions of the word 'forced').
> Now some proponents of the anti-parasitic drug traditionally used for animals are falsely claiming COVID-19 vaccinations haven't passed animal studies.
Not my claim either.
This is my claim: human trials started before animal trials were finished:
> While testing processes do typically take years, this also factors in the production to testable levels of said vaccines, whereas mRNA vaccines are far more quickly and efficiently produced, reducing this time dramatically.
The quickness of production is unrelated to how long it takes to test its effects.
> Also to be taken into account, work on coronavirus vaccination in humans had already been in the pipeline since the Avian Flu crises. This wasn't something new.
Can you point out the mRNA vaccines developed then?
> Most people couldn't access the vaccine for much longer periods of time. Certainly no-one was being forced early on (and that goes for varying definitions of the word 'forced').
Someone who rejects the broad and overwhelming scientific consensus and cherry-picks extreme cantankerous outliers to support their position that there is a "they" who are "forcing" people do something for some handwavy conspiracy nonsense.
> From initially refusing to acknowledge the situation to lying and cohercing people into taking untested injections whose side effects on the population remain unknown
You're spewing bullshit right here. COVID vaccines went through clinical trials and had a great safety profile.
Is it acceptable to get mad at all suboptimal behaviors during that debacle, or only a subset of them? And if a subset: who decides, how do they decide, and who made the decision that this is the obligatory structure that we all must adopt without being asked for agreement?
The worst was a local meetup member who worked for a company that either made vaccines or worked in virology and still didn’t get his vaccinations. He had all these bullshit reasons he dressed up as science. He got screamed at by the oldest person in the group and stopped showing up. But goddamn.
Vaccines don’t work on everyone who takes them, and they tend to be less effective in the elderly. Every one of those people are counting on the rest of us to not bring shit to their doorsteps.
I think COVID (and the 2020 events, especially in the USA - I was living in Minneapolis at that time, so I might be biased) increased mental health awareness. For everyone, but especially for "essential workers".
Supply chain improvements have been made to increase diversification and resilience.
There was a lot of individualism to cast a shadow, but also cooperation and solidarity was shining on a small scale (hobbyist 3d-printing and donating shields and face mask relief thingies), but also globally.
Without getting into the healthcare and technology advancements we accomplished as a species.
I agree with what I think is the implied premise of your question - which - I'd make explicit as - its not clear we can agree what the lessons even were?
For example, was it good that we closed parks? Remember when sand was poured into skateparks? Or the parks in NYC were padlocked? Was it good that we closed schools for so long? Remember the amount of shaming that happened when some people went to the beaches? Remember when the grocery stores had arrows about which way the direction of the aisle went? Remember how long we handed out bacteria wipes as though it was spread through dirty surfaces?
I'm not sure us peons in society are the only ones who need to learn lessons here.
Funny. What appear to be the "lessons of COVID" appear to be a reinforcement of people's own beliefs. One could just as well "learn from COVID" that:
The government is correct when they request large-scale public health interventions and you should go along with it when it makes large scale interventions since some of these require coordination on an urgent time-scale.
and just as well that
Paternalism does not work. Providing diktats from the throne result in some quarter of the population revolting against the idea, causing coordination failure.
Whether one chooses the former or the latter seem entirely dependent on one's preconceived beliefs.
And also on whether or not one is aware of the number of deaths avoided by government action, and the documented existence of disinformation networks which were - and still are - promoting extremes of polarised social division and self-harm.
- it is not possible to be aware of aware of the number of deaths avoided by government action, because counter-factual reality is not accessible; humans typically substitute a simulation in response, but often do not know that has occurred
- there is no requirement for documentation ("documented existence of disinformation networks") to be accurate
- in some cases, and for various reasons (choice of inadequate variable types in one's analysis/cognition, ie: "existence", cultural norms), it is not possible for documentation to be accurate and comprehensive, and this is one of those times
- in some cases it is not possible to apply this sort of level of rigor, this seems to almost always be one of those times (all people on all sides are engaged in deceit, intentionally or not), at least so far in humanity's evolution
- In most serious organizations, an event of this scale would prompt a post incident analysis, there seems to be little sign that anyone considers this event serious enough to justify such an analysis (COVID seems to have triggered one of the many paradoxes in the system in that it is super serious, but also not, simultaneously)
- this list is far from exhaustive
- humans will have very interesting (and typically predictable) reactions to the contents of this list, or others like it (the system is susceptible to a list based attack?)
Some people got twisted up in Fauci’s stated estimates being off by a factor of two, and people using bad math to say they were off by a lot more than that.
When only 25% of the population has been exposed you expect 1/4 of the projected death toll. Then multiply by 2 and now you’re pushing an order of magnitude. But what we are seeing is a pretty steady .9% mortality rate for people who are exposed.
Meanwhile the fatality rate for this last flu season was 1/16th of COVID (which is another comparison they liked to make).
The problem with 1% is that almost everyone will know someone who died. But they took it like the odds of winning the lottery. Let’s just gamble that’s a small number!
> But what we are seeing is a pretty steady .9% mortality rate for people who are exposed.
The distribution of risk is almost entirely concentrated on people who have so few years left in their life compared to the rest of humanity whereas the burden of all the interventions falls squarely on the young, who DO propagate humanity into the future, and who are at essentially no major risk.
Representing covid as a .9% generalized risk is nothing short of willful (self?) deception.
I don't think so — in this specific case (and probably you can extrapolate to some degree in a generic way) one of those viewpoints has proven to be more successful/adaptive/helpful than the other. Even though they are both "true" to a degree.
I mean, there are all sorts of confounding factors, but in a rough sense we are now able to look at various populations (countries, states, or even friend/acquaintance cohorts) that leaned into one or the other of those positions, and compare how they fared.
If you look at the flu seasons, I think one of the lessons is that relatively modest behavioral and infrastructural changes could radically reduce harm from respiration-transmitted diseases. However I think it's a lesson that went mostly unlearned.
The future I was expecting was a strong increase in ventilation, widespread adoption of CO2 measurements in public spaces (in the same way we measure temperature and humidity now), and experiments with things like UV to reduce disease particle viability. Along with behavioral changes, like staying home when sick, some continued use of masking, and use of mRNA techniques so people get something like quarterly vaccines that cover all the diseases we're trying to keep in check.
What I instead got was an anti-science politicization of reasonable public health measures that 20 years ago would have been inconceivable. And then a giant collective shrug where we see plenty of ongoing death and a continuing rise of long Covid such that we have millions partly or wholly disabled. Including with brain fog, a symptom that I, as a programmer, would fine particularly devastating.
Two of my local haunts have UV lights and a number of places have much better ventilation now. It’s not every place but it’s some.
The other thing we should bring back are brass and silver handles. Both of which can kill surface germs almost instantly. It has to be unlaquered though and you’ll find a lot of brass coated in plastic to keep it from corroding.
We are bound to repeat the errors of our ancestors when we forget the lessons they paid for with blood, sweat and tears. Hence why I am afraid of the passing of those who lived through the 1930/40s. I seems we are quickly forgetting lots of what humanity learned during those years.
These lessons aren't forgotten, Japan is as aware of its geography as the Netherlands are of theirs.
Instead tradeoffs are made.
The same way people near forests get their house burned down but rebuild at the same place because they can afford it. Or we deplete underground water because stopping it would be an uphill political battle etc.
I can't imagine any recent catastrophe where the core cause of it would be sheer ignorance of the potential for risk.
About “I can't imagine any recent catastrophe where the core cause of it would be sheer ignorance of the potential for risk.”, there are a lot of recent examples. E.g.:
> Prior to August 2014, additional chlorine had been added to eliminate bacteria from the Flint River. (...) Following this test, the MDEQ placed Flint on violation notice but did not reveal the information to residents until January 2015.
> A cargo of 2,750 tonnes of [ammonium nitrate] (equivalent to around 1.1 kilotons of TNT) had been stored in a warehouse without proper safety measures for the previous six years after having been confiscated by Lebanese authorities from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant should never have been build at that location OR at least should have received a more proper protection against tsunamis. They clearly forgot/ignored the historical knowledge of much higher tsunamis.
There's two things going on for nuclear plants in Japan:
- they need water, tons and tons of water, and there's only mountains inland. So any nuclear plant will be on the shore, where tsunamis will hit first.
- there is no safe place from natural disaster. Even building a miracle plant on a mountain top would still leave it vulnerable to seisms, typhoons and land slides.
All things considered, the main issue is how much the nuclear plant is suppose to be resistant to tsunamis and earthquakes, and the higher the threshold the crazier the expenses become.
For Fukushima, it was a classic example of design failure (failsafes were supposed to work except they were badly designed, and there was too few of them), and no proper reaction to earlier warnings of the system in place being too weak. In a way, all the blame is clearly on TEPCO however we put it:
> For Fukushima, it was a classic example of design failure (failsafes were supposed to work except they were badly designed, and there was too few of them), and no proper reaction to earlier warnings of the system in place being too weak. In a way, all the blame is clearly on TEPCO however we put it:
There's always at least two parties in a regulated environment like nuclear power. The government setting the baseline requirements and the operator adhering to them. I have not enough inside to say who to blame. On the other hand TEPCO is state owned, right, so maybe you should never set your own requirements when it comes to nuclear safety?
Given the learning checkpoint below that page alone, I have to question the quality of the information presented there.
How can
"It is hard to assess how much money to spend on those policies; it might depend on the budget, priorities, politics, etc."
be the correct/useful answer to
"How should governments address low-probability hazard events with potentially devastating consequences? How would you assess how much money is too much money to spend to reduce the likelihood of a highly unlikely event? Please select the correct answer."
I mean, it's such a generic answer, it feels like it's been LLM generated.
We do this all over the place. For example, there's the idea that whatever warnings and suggestions are in the Bible are obsolete because we as moderns know better. EG "in the past they needed religion because of X but not we don't."
But the idea is flawed in that if the Bible wrote 3000 years ago about certain virtues and dangers, presumably it is because they had seen what the opposite looks like and thought it was important to codify and pass forward that knowledge in a way that had a shot of being still read thousands of years later.
In other words, our idea to discard the ideas in the Bible is not novel, it is perhaps the same idea that has led to disaster millennia ago that caused the Bible to be what it is to begin with.
It is similar to looking at a "tsunami stone" and saying "why would I heed advice of someone who has never seen a microwave oven when I have modern science."
The Bible is obsolete because the saner parts have been extracted and integrated into either the law system (e.g. the marriage system in the west) or education and social values, and have been refined other centuries of discussion and challenges to come up with a set of rules and principles that can work for our current population density and life style.
And in particular these rules and principles will continue to evolve, where the Bible wont.
What remains proper to the Bible are the funky bits, the outright offensive parts and anachronistic advices.
What nobody seems to wonder about is why both the Bible and Quran strongly prohibited gay sex and that idea is so widespread across most of history and most of the world, even today, and even in China which doesn't have a history of those religions. You can't say we know better now because we're better educated when we don't know the reason in the first place.
There are some clues. The Bible has the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which might be a collective memory of societies becoming gay-friendly and promiscuous then being destroyed somehow. It could have been put into a story about God to make it memorable across generations (we do still have the story after-all, and we don't still have the actual history). In Islam, Mohammed said his greatest fear was that Muslims would turn gay. Why was he so afraid of that? Maybe there was cultural knowledge of what too much tolerance for gayness leads to and we just don't have that knowledge in our recorded history.
Not saying I have the answer, but nobody else does either. It's naïve to just look at the direct consequences and say "they're not hurting anybody so it's fine". There might be destructive emergent social phenomena that come from it being widely accepted over the long term. We only have basically 2 generations of data on gay-friendly western society to observe from.
I'd suggest using your best judgement - no one here is advocating for orthodoxy. Times have changed over the last 2-3000 years, and things that were once practical may not be anymore.
I think you might be assuming that the only interpretation of religious text is that they are all-or-nothing affairs, across the board. One of the core tenets to Christianity is the recognition that everyone is going to sin (or not "adhere to the supposed wisdom of the divine" as you put it) and that they will still be forgiven.
> presumably it is because they had seen what the opposite looks like
Ouch. "Presumably" isn't a logical proposition. Not even close.
I am sure there is wisdom in the different religious heritages. But the religious heritages that lasted were able to do so using a fair amount of practices and beliefs aimed at carrying along commitment to that heritage, as much or more than general wisdom (which has value beyond the religion).
(Not dismissing the value anyone gets from their practices and beliefs, where they don't negatively impact others or treat non-believers dismissively.)
You mean what? That if we sin (like you know all that giant list of outdated ways to sin like touching a woman when she is menstruating) there will be a giant rain and we will drawn? So did you made your giant boat or first you need to wait for God to tell you to do it in a dream?
Sorry , but some people will not follow those outdated rules and also worship a extremely cruel genocidal inhuman God, if my sin will cause you to have to build a boat to save yourself sorry but I don't care.
I think you're misreading what I am saying and injecting some extra anger.
To use a simple example of what I meant - in the west, the secular section of society has below-replacement fertility. In other words, for whatever reason that group is slowly dying off. I hate to say this as someone who was secular most of my life but I think it's objectively true (do you disagree?)
Meanwhile religious folks live in the same world as we do yet somehow are able to maintain 2.5 to 3.5 fertility rate (this is in the US) depending on which version of the "homicidal inhuman G-d" they believe in.
This suggests to me that somewhere in that "religious" operating system is encoded immunity to things that are slowly killing off the unreligious right now. That's the kind of thing I was talking about in my post - we should be very careful about discarding that.
> To use a simple example of what I meant - in the west, the secular section of society has below-replacement fertility. In other words, for whatever reason that group is slowly dying off.
Except that the secular section is also replenished by children of the religious becoming secular, which currently seems to be outweighing the relative birthrate differences and is causing that secular section to be increasing as a percentage of the population.
"Looking at the U.S. public as a whole, however, the answer to the question of whether more education is correlated with less religion appears to be yes. Among all U.S. adults, college graduates are considerably less likely than those who have less education to say religion is “very important” in their lives: Fewer than half of college graduates (46%) say this, compared with nearly six-in-ten of those with no more than a high school education (58%)."
I am sure you know of the correlation between affluent people having fewer children and highly educated people tending to be more affluent. I dont think its particularly mysterious or confusing why secular populations have a lower fertility rate. It should be pretty obvious at a glance.
Religion is a lot like conservatism in that it provides a self affirming world view that relies on ethics from centuries past. I am sure there are many highly democratic, rich and ethical conservatives and religious types but generally these traits are indicators of the opposite. There is a reason the past century of progress has allowed such great leaps in education, quality of life etc while being accompanied by an ever decreasing level of religiosity.
I think if you gave an honest effort at interpreting what he said, you'd find that he's saying there's a reason religion has survived as long as it has.
He's not claiming that your actions are going to cause a biblical flood - that's something you're projecting on to him and, in my opinion, just feels like mockery for the sake of mockery.
He's suggesting that there are generation-spanning lessons that had been learned, both ethical and practical, that made their way into scriptures. Not all the lessons in the Bible (or other religious text) are going to be pertinent to the modern day. To say it contains nothing of value, and that nothing can be learned from, it proves his point exactly.
So your point is that there is a chance that soem microscopic parts in the Bible contain good lessons? I agree, some children stories also have good lesions.
The fact that religion survived or spread does not prove what you imply it proves, it was an useful tool for the powerful to keep the poor in check like
1 Bible says to pay your taxes
2 Bible says that is OK to be poor because you will be rewarded later
3 Bible says that violence is bad so do not attack your lord and try to make justice on Earth, you will get your justice in the next realm.
For one thing, the loosening of the wall between investment banking and deposit banking, which played a role in the 2008 near-collapse. We built that wall after the Great Depression showed that it was necessary. But around 2000, people forgot why, and the banks pushed for it to be removed so they could make more money.
