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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   27588 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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80+ dead and rising in Central Texas floods.

Kerr County is the Summer Camp capital of Texas. It's rugged hill country terrain and proximity to the Guadelupe River is perfect for exotic adventures outdoors, and it is close enough to major population centers to be convenient for parents to drop-off their children.

The downside is that low-lying cabins get completely wiped out in flood events. Camp Mystic for girls has double-digit casualties alone.

It is a common refrain to bemoan the fact that, "we don't let kids be kids anymore," and that may be true, but a big part of it is that we as a society simply don't consider the inherent risks acceptable anymore. I shudder to think about making 10-year-olds sit through a 30-minute site-specific emergency preparedness seminar, but that's where this is going, and given what's happened, I'm not entirely sure it would be a bad thing.

I hesitate to be the cold calculating math guy but.... no wait, I can't help myself, I am that guy: 80 people isn't actually that many. I mean, obviously every death is a tragedy for themselves and the people who knew them. But when you zoom out to the perspective of a country of 300 million people, it's tiny.

80 deaths * 80 QALYS lost * 365 * 24 * 60 / 300,000,000 = 11 QALMS (Quality adjusted life minutes). That is, on average preventing a catastrophe of this magnitude is worth 11 minutes of life averaged over everybody in the country. If your proposed solutions of "don't let kids be kids anymore", "take time doing flood preparedness drills" and "spend lots of money damming every river everywhere" costs more than 11 minutes per person in terms of actual time and lessened enjoyment and life lived, then it won't be worth it. (though if you can get costs lower than that it is worth it).

Google says annual flood deaths in the U.S. are ~125, so ballpark this number is approximately right, you'd have to prevent this many deaths at that cost ratio consistently every year (and you'd actually have to reduce it by that much, across the entire country, not just Summer Camps).

I think we should let kids be kids, and we should sometimes consider the inherent risks acceptable. People die, it's a thing that happens. And it's bad that it happens, but if we don't have magic finger snapping powers that make it not happen for free, then we have to consider the costs and tradeoffs. And the thing nobody wants to admit is that, mathematically, there MUST be a point where the costs are no longer worth it. You can make arguments about where that point is, but the argument has to start with the assumption that there is such a point.

People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead, so you can't trade off QALYs for time worked 1 for 1. Instead it's just another adjustor to quality-of-life, roughly equivalent to time spent working without being paid (the actual workers get paid, but it destroys the value they would produce doing something else). You could also compare the cost to the standard "economic value of the life" calculations derived from the premiums on risky jobs, and indeed certain safety measures require risky construction work and thus are partially paid for with the deaths and disabling of the construction workers you have implement them. Your calculation is still useful as a sanity check though, even though the actual tradeoff in time spent wouldn't be 11 minutes.

People would rather spend time attending a safety seminar or working than reduce their lifespan and spend an equal amount of time being dead

I'll trade safety seminars 1:1 for shortened lifespan any day of the week.

Note that "total blindness", "clinical depression", and "chronic pain" all involve average QALY estimates that still imply an above-zero value of life. There's a lot of people with those conditions who would gladly sign up for boring seminars if they eliminated their condition for the duration of the seminar. And of course history is full of people opting for unpleasant slave-labor over death. So if you're not joking your opinion seems non-representative.

Note my trade is not at par for QALYs, it's at par for unadjusted LYs.

Oh sure, but in this case we're trading off with risk of being killed as a child, not 11 extra minutes on your deathbed, so QALYs are the appropriate metric. By "reduce their lifespan" I was imagining it as taking those minutes from their prime, reducing healthspan by an equal amount.

Your math seems to assume they would only have lived one more year each. (If I understood it right, and if I didn't, it might be because most of the symbols seem to be missing...) Many were kids with their whole life ahead of them. It's 11 minutes per year they would have lived on average, plus other considerations of the sort self_made_human pointed out.

His math is right:

"80 deaths 80 QALYS lost 365 2460 = 11 QALMS (Quality adjusted life minutes)"

80 deaths * 80 QALYS (generous, statistically prob. more like 60-70) lost * 365 * 24 * 60 / 330,000,000 => 10.19 (rounds up to 11 minutes)

Whether the population of the US is the right denominator is potentially debatable, but is not a priori crazy.

If you want to do things on a flood plain, surely you should be prepared for a flood. Better yet, manage the water so it won't flood. Flooding isn't akin to 'oh no this playground is too exciting, little Timmy might bruise himself, better make it as dull as possible' safetyism, it's a serious issue that destroys a great deal of property along with killing people.

I also submit that Los Angeles shouldn't have been burning down this year either. The US is supposed to be rich and this part of LA doubly so. Rich people aren't supposed to have their houses burn down. Clear away the flammable shrubs and have some water in tanks so it doesn't just run dry and people are running around tossing oat milk onto fires, as in one memorable case. LA couldn't be bothered to properly prepare for fires in a fire-prone area, couldn't be bothered to clear out vegetation, couldn't be bothered to pass the marshmallow test and paid the price.

I don't see why it's not cost-efficient to take these measures for a rich country. What else was the money going to be spent on, boomer welfare, fake jobs in medicine?

Clear away the flammable shrubs

Ironically, my understanding from reading on the internet is that this is actually the problem. They DO clear away flammable stuff, at least the small stuff that's feasible to clear, which means regular small fires don't happen and so larger flammable stuff accumulates and accumulates so when a fire does break out it's super crazy bad. While if they allowed small fires to happen and eat whatever has accumulated then it would be more manageable.

Yeah I'm pretty sure he's talking about the shrubs around people's houses -- prophylactic burning is probably not a great control mechanism there...

As Eliezer Yudowsky once said, “That which can be destroyed by fire, should be.”

Rich countries tend to suffer from Cost Disease and overregulation which stops a lot of things that ought to be easy to do from happening.

I agree that after you get this many wildfires, there should be incentives to throw money at the problem until it stops. But if people are willing to throw money without limit, someone will be willing to soak all those funds up and deliver as little as possible.

While I certainly endorse the principle, shouldn't the figures be much higher because the relevant population are people who even have to seriously consider the risk of drowning due to a flood? The risk of being attacked by a shark per capita is pretty low, but most people don't live next to an ocean.

I think rich countries shouldn't be building houses and infrastructure in flood plains without damming or proper measures to control the water. It's not impossible. The Netherlands has most of its economic activity below sea level, they eroded the North Sea.

There are big floods all the time in Britain and Australia that wreck people's houses. There ought to be a more aggressive stance taken towards the weather, bring it under control one way or another.

@RandomRanger @faceh

The real turning point will be when insurance companies stop covering those areas. Flood insurance in the Texas gulf coast already has to be subsidized by the state government because it’s just not profitable anymore.

Its kinda funny (not in the 'haha' way) that government and citizens alike ignore this market signal of "IF YOU BUILD HERE, YOUR HOUSE WILL LIKELY BE DESTROYED, (AND YOU MAY DIE) ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY SURE?

That said, I also note that we just build things way more densely than ever before, in terms of how much expensive infrastructure we pack into each acre in some places.

I sincerely assume that there is no chance that Insurance Cos. and their underwriters can stay solvent if a serious earthquake hits the Los Angeles area, or a Cat 5. Hurricane rips through Miami.

If the insurance was charged at the actual market rate, I would also guess that many places would only be inhabited by the uberrich who can self-insure, or by the poorer folks who go without insurance, build cheap, and don't quite understand the risk they're assuming.

I live in Coastal Florida so I've seen a mix of both happening.

has to be subsidized by the state government because it’s just not profitable anymore.

AKA: charging what it costs would be unacceptable. I'm sure there's some price where it makes sense to offer flood insurance in a floodplain, but the government decided that people should pay less than that.

At least it isn't a price control forcing the insurance companies take an (expected) loss on every policy.

Yeah, a straight subsidy is better then whatever price controls CA keeps flirting with. There's a real risk that of breaking the property insurance market with those sorts of moves.

No, we should, but it shouldn't include camps for children. Places like New Orleans should have buildings, they should be basically shanty-port towns for workers. Mostly single men. And they should get risk wages like high wire guys do, and probably should have a union that negotiates life insurance.

But children certainly shouldn't be living in floodplains.

Most places in the US do tightly regulate floodplain development. Most places like these summer camps, some of which are 100 years old, are grandfathered in so it's left to local government, communities, and operators to determine what they need to do to ensure adequate safety.

End of day you really can't account for every variable, or conditions that are far outside the 'expected' normal range.

Weather in particular is a chaotic system. Some days the conditions just happen to coincide to make things more severe than expected.

Remember just about a month ago a Swiss village got swept away by an avalanche. What are we to do about this risk? Engineer every mountain to be stable?

Or Volcanic eruptions. We don't HAVE an engineering solution to those!

The arguably better solution in many cases is to build the houses and infrastructure as cheaply as can reasonably be done so they can be more easily rebuilt, and spend the extra money on early warning and evacuation efforts.

I want my buildings on giant-fuck-off concrete/steel stilts engineered so hard that the wrath of god can't touch em.

IRC § R306 (Flood-Resistant Construction):

Buildings and structures in non-coastal flood-hazard areas [i. e., with waves < 1.5 ft] shall have the lowest floors elevated to or above the base [100-year] flood elevation plus 1 foot.

Buildings and structures erected within coastal flood-hazard areas [with waves ∈ [1.5 ft, 3 ft]] and coastal high-hazard areas [with waves > 3 ft] shall be elevated so that the bottom of the lowest horizontal structural members supporting the lowest floor, with the exception of piling, pile caps, columns, grade beams, and bracing, is elevated to or above the base flood elevation plus 1 foot.

Buildings and structures erected within coastal flood-hazard areas and coastal high-hazard areas shall be supported on pilings or columns.

And if you're prepared to pay for that, you can!

That's about the reality if you're buying waterfront property on the coastline of Florida.

Naturally, only really wealthy people can buy such property.

Mastering chaotic systems is the whole point of the game. That's what civilization is for, managing irrigation and controlling rivers is one of the oldest duties of government. We should also be working harder on controlling the weather. Weather is very complex but new AI methods are useful here, plus more sensors would be useful.

Building infrastructure to be replaceable and developing early warning systems is good but controlling the system entirely is better. Past a certain level of development, when human activity alters the whole climate system, we have to get more serious about controlling the environment rather than simply inhabiting it.

Imagine a man living in a huge mansion. His presence reshapes it slowly but surely as he builds up endless empty beer cans, bags full of garbage are overflowing. Rats and pests are building up. There are mysterious stains on the walls. And the mansion isn't so great in the first place, there are floorboards that mustn't be stood on, broken windows that let in the cold air.

He can either minimize his presence (not buy all these beer cans, eat 100% of his food so there's minimal waste, not tread where it's dangerous) or he can grow up and clear out all the garbage, renovate to fix up this place. Even though renovations are expensive, exhausting and you never know what kind of unexpected costs will emerge, it's still the right decision.

Weather is very complex but new AI methods are useful here, plus more sensors would be useful.

That's the, I dunno, "scary" part.

Quelling weather in one place might make it harsher somewhere else. How do you dissipate the energy of this system without it bursting out all at once somewhere?

That said, I would be all for engineering the paths of major hurricanes so they don't intersect with land at all. Simple enough approach.

Note, I'm huge on eventually rendering weather a nonissue. Become a Kardashev II Civ ASAP.

Or build O'Neill colonies where the weather can be precisely controlled at all times.

The CW angle is that Trump and Doge downsized the National Weather Service. This made sense ideologically -- meteorologists are basically climate researchers, and thus likely to be more worried about climate change than immigrants, plus college-educated pronoun-bearers. And I am sure that some of the NWS people were installed there by previous administrations for political reasons (which I happen to be sympathize with). But separating the wheat from the chaff would require a scalpel, not the chainsaw of doge.

Anyhow, in this case, the Guardian reports that NWS cuts did not contribute to the tragedy:

Despite funding cuts and widespread staffing shortages implemented by the Trump administration, NWS forecasters in both the local San Angelo office and at the NWS national specialty center responsible for excessive rainfall provided a series of watches and warnings in the days and hours leading up to Friday’s flooding disaster.

The forecast office in San Angelo has two current vacancies – typical for the pre-Trump era and fewer than the current average staff shortage across the NWS – and has not been experiencing any lapses in weather balloon data collection that have plagued some other offices.

[...] In a final escalation, the NWS office in San Angelo issued a flash flood emergency about an hour before the water started rapidly rising beyond flood stage at the closest US Geological Survey river monitoring gauge.

The NWS got the estimate of severity wrong for which they are being blamed by Texan GOP officials. Did the firings affect that estimate? Who can say. If there is blame to assign though, it should go to the elected officials of Kerr County who decided not to install rising water warning systems despite a similar tragedy occurring previously (and their neighboring counties having installed these systems) and who delayed any kind of emergency response that night until hours after the floods started despite having received those flood warnings from the NWS.

What I expect is for the GOP to blame nameless government functionaries despite being the reigning regime, the Dems to blame Trump who will attract ire (deserved and undeserved) like a lightning rod, and the idiotic good ole boy Republicans that actually dropped the ball and got people killed to escape scrutiny.

The NWS got the estimate of severity wrong for which they are being blamed by Texan GOP officials.

Is there any evidence that someone falsified the model output, decided to round 1.6mm/minute to 1mm/min or something like that?

If the complaint is simply that the model turned out not to match reality, that does not seem to be a remotely fair complaint. The job of the NWS to provide an estimate and an error bar. What is an appropriate response given a certain best estimate of a disaster probability is a political decision.

This feels like a bereft spouse yelling at a doctor "But you said there was an 85% chance he would survive the operation, so we thought it was safe. Why did you lie to us!"

I agree with the rest of your comment.

The bigger problem was that everyone was asleep. My phone does go off with a weather alert when anything worse than a thunderstorm pops up, but it probably wouldn't wake me up. If you live near a danger zone then you ought to install a dedicated warning app that's really loud.

I think that this is related to an inflation of alerts. For the forecasters, the incentives are to always warn, no matter if it is "there may be ice on the road, drive carefully" or "a hurricane will flood 90% of the area covered by this cell tower in minutes".

Basically, I would be fine with being woken up by an alert which has a 10% chance to save my life. For a typical user, this will perhaps happen once in their lifetime, probably less. However, I do not care about weather alerts which may kill a handful of people in an area of a few 100k. Send me a text if you must, but if I die due to ice on the road because I did not bother to check my phone in the morning, that will be on me.

But as the incentives are structured in a way to always exaggerate alerts, you run in the "boy who cried wolf" problem -- nobody wants a phone which wakes them up whenever a weather event which might theoretically kill someone happens in their general area.

Of course, the outcome this would excuse is if you had a bunch of people who drowned after randomly deciding to camp at the river bank. What happened here was instead that the organizers of a summer camp for kids dropped the ball. A level of care which might be tolerable when you are out drinking and fishing with your buddies is not necessarily tolerable when running an organized event. Of course, for all I know, the safety concern level of the organizers was above average. "Site specific disaster kills your charges" is an exceedingly rare outcome, and was probably not even on the radar of most camp organizers a week ago.

Alarm fatigue is a real thing. I know lots of people that have mentioned disabling alerts like this because they're tired of Amber Alerts (missing kids, often custody disputes) or Blue Alerts (for police getting fired at) from hundreds of miles away, or to be honest, even lots of NWS alerts, which IMO seem to have started appearing more often for less severe weather. I feel like I get weather alerts that are well meaning, but not surprising: "severe heat warning" for most of the South in summer isn't wrong, but I didn't need a klaxon to tell me that (uncertain if I've gotten one exactly like that, but not too far from it).

There is a tier of unblockable alerts, but we've only tested that once. I think we need to better-align the alerts with the people that need to see them.

There was a documentary on the tornado in Joplin, MO where someone was visiting the area from California. They were dining at a local restaurant when the sirens started sounding. They were alarmed, but locals around them didn't react and reassured them that "this happens all the time" and wasn't something to be concerned about.

And then the tornado came right through town.

So a lot of locals in weather-prone areas are desensitized to the warnings, even when the klaxons really do go off.

Then again, the opposite can also happen. My father grew up in Kansas, and is the most weather-aware person I know: when I was a teenager/young adult he would always have the forecast memorized. There were lots of "wait, you're going where today? There's severe weather coming in, possible hail." When he learned he could access weather information at any time on his computer, I'm pretty sure it was like a revelation for him.

As someone who was in Tuscaloosa when we were hit earlier that year I chalk the local nonchalance up to a few things. Aside from the over-prevalence of false alarms it's hard to really comprehend what "this happens" means unless it happens to you. I shrugged it off as a joke even as I was dodging an EF-4 in my car delivering pizzas until I was rummaging around bombed out parts of town with my friend whose survival had suddenly been in doubt looking for his friends because communications were pretty much totally gone. I learned something about myself that week: It's easy enough for me to be personally brave or at least unconcerned with my safety enough to do something stupid like volunteer to take a delivery knowing full and well that there was a tornado on the ground. Holding it together in the face of people who'd lost something to everything and who'd only been guilty of being less fortunate than I was in the space of a few minutes was not so easy. The sense of suffering and apocalypse was overwhelming and not something I hope to witness again.

People were understandably more obedient toward the weather people for some years after (and to the meteorologists' credit they got it right on 4/27/11) but over time I guess you're going to be a worry-wart or not. Maybe my take isn't the healthiest, but it's this: If it's an EF-3 or less you're unlikely to get hit in the first place and probably will survive even if your house gets trashed. If it's an EF-4/5 after having seen brick apartment buildings and schools flattened I feel like there's not much point in worrying because unless you've got a bunker to climb into whether or not you survive is more a question of fate than weather awareness.

Yeah, tornadoes are bad that way. Even where tornados are common, most of the time tornados hit somewhere else. With floods, it's a bit more predictable, they hit the same exact spots.

I live near a large memory care facility, we get a lot of Silver Alerts from it. I'm ok with a text level of notification, but the actual alarm should be reserved for evacuation orders.

Yep, alarm fatigue is all too easy to fall into. It's always well meaning - someone makes the case that X should be really important, and nobody wants to be the one to tell them "actually that isn't important enough". But when everything is important, nothing is, and so people start to ignore everything as a way to cope with the onslaught. It applies to the phone alerts of course, but I see it all the time in network monitoring systems too. Sometimes you even see people start to invent higher tiers of "high priority" in an attempt to solve the problem, but unless they solve the actual problem (no one is willing to say no/they aren't listened to if they do), such efforts go about as you would expect.

I remember one of my old workplaces kind of avoided this due to the heroic efforts of a few very curmudgeonly and perhaps slightly autistic engineers that liked their environments and notifications in very particular ways. They would absolutely be the ones to say "no I don't care if this major product is down in production, I don't need to know about it because I work on this other unrelated minor product. You can't have an engineering team wide alert for your system going down.

Not the heroes we deserve, but the ones we need.

A flash of light and a loud bang followed by my phone announcing a thunderstorm warning happens at least several times a summer. Yeah, and no shit...

There were probably just memorable and your brain converts being able to remember multiple storms as meaning they must have happened often. Most parts of CA really don't get major thunderstorms all that often. Once every 1-3 years sounds about right for where I'm at for ex.

but I didn't need a klaxon to tell me that

It's a Blue Tribe Is Right About Global Warming alarm; the fact it's a klaxon in the first place tells you it really isn't well-meaning.

I thought that were the thousands of news headlines along the lines of "worst summer ever; climate finally punishes us for our sins; repent now the end is nigh".

This would make a great drunken assertion but it feels kinda random in context.

Flash floods and earthquakes are probably my most feared natural disasters, since they give very little warning and there's no real workable contingency for their occurrence.

But as far as disaster preparedness, we humans simply aren't (yet) capable of holding back the forces of nature when they run amok.

Occasionally we get reminded that even our most destructive wars barely hold a candle to a single "act of God."

There's almost nowhere on the planet you can keep your kids that won't be vulnerable to some natural disaster or other.

Civilization has mitigated so many threats that it is easy to feel safe and sound, but every single year there's a set of dice rolls that determine if a particular human settlement gets obliterated or not.

Unless we're willing to spend the entirety of global GDP attempting to disaster-proof every single town and city, we are to left with the option of praying to whatever higher power we believe in.

Occasionally we get reminded that even our most destructive wars barely hold a candle to a single "act of God."

WW2 killed more people than any "act of God" in recorded history. I'd be more concerned about a nuclear exchange than I would about any natural disaster that's likely to happen during my life expectancy.

Guess that depends on whether you consider plagues or pandemics in that category.

And I'd specifically point out that WWII took a long time to kill that many people, whereas most natural disasters happen over minutes, to hours, to days at most.

In 2004, an earthquake/Tsunami combo killed like 225,000 people in a day.

So on a simple deaths/hour calculation, I'm not certain your point would hold.

A single hurricane allegedly releases almost as much energy as the entirety of humanity's nuclear bomb stockpile. And there's 5-15 of those per year.

Redditors are blaming Orange Man for DOGE's cuts to NOAA and NWS which they claimed contributed to the loss of life. I'd be less skeptical if this didn't sound almost exactly like the claims that Orange Man's cuts to the CDC caused grandma to die of Covid. From what I can tell, the flood deaths were mainly due to (1) the county not having a [modern?] warning system, (2) the camp leader not erring on the side of caution to evacuate [to be fair, this was a 100 year flood], and (3) the flood happening in the middle of the night. Did I miss anything?

Also, please say a quick prayer for the families of the victims if you're the praying type.

Similar to how I've advised previously with x.com, I'd advise others to consider blacklisting reddit.com in their machine's hosts file. There is utility in refusing to allow the darkest thoughts of the most troubled people into your mind space.

Imagining Mother Earth opening up and swallowing the children of your enemies as some kind of quasi-divine retribution for opposing your preferred flavor of government spending is insane. It's good to remember that quipping about how the "finding out phase is beginning" in response to little children dying at a real dinner party would earn you some pretty thick stares regardless of how blue the company.

Not a bad suggestion, luckily for me I don't really read much Reddit outside of niche subreddits that are devoid of politics. Reddit takes are too boring to even hate-read. I've also been able to quit 4chan this year for the same reason, it's complete braindead noise now.

Yeah, I... Yeah.

It's gotten really awful. I still go to /r/all sometimes to get a sense of what normies are seeing on social media and it is so brutal and bleak. Doesn't exactly ruin my day but I always come out of it terribly disheartened. The derangement, the self-righteousness, the absolute inability to imagine any other narrative. Clicking on threads which contain straightforward outrageous lies in the title only to find everyone nodding along, bashing 'MAGAs' for mostly-unrelated reasons, and one brave person pointing out that the whole thing is bogus -- only to be heavily downvoted of course. The speed and volume of the echo chamber are bewildering.

To be sure, though, niche communities are often still great, and that's what reddit's really about imo. It's a shame how much garbage has to be waded through to find them, but once the account is set up correctly it's fairly usable. Even if the toxicity has a way of working itself into everything eventually.

Also, the sheer popularity of trans-oriented comics drawn in hideous art styles is entirely baffling to me.

The most baffling I saw on the front page was a headline about how the University of Minnesota allows senior citizens to audit classes for 10 dollars a credit hour.

"Oh, how cute," I thought.

Redditors were furious.

I think there might be a dynamic going on whereby the kind of person who hangs out on big Reddit subs is looking to be angry, (either because that's their hobby or because of selective pressure on comments in a large subreddit), so pattern matches even completely innocuous stories into rage bait (in this case something about student debt and boomers stealing from the future).

Redditors were furious.

I sincerely can't imagine why.

Is reddit even "normie" anymore?

Last I checked it was still a top ten site, but idk.

The extreme popularity of lgbt (and especially t) content on the front page makes me wonder if it isn't just convergently evolving into another tumblr.

My experience with a very small sample size of normies (my wife) is that they use reddit to view only one or two hobby subreddits.

Tumblr is more ideologically diverse than Reddit these days.

I'm not sure I'd put this on kids or parenting attitudes. The important questions here are:

How foreseeable was this flooding? Is that a zone that historically floods? What was the worst ever flood there? Was this not the worst, only a bit worse than the worst ever, or like completely out of proportion with anything that ever happened in the area?

If it was reasonably foreseeable what was the plan to mitigate this risk and why did it fail?

And finally, if it was foreseeable and the plan was inadequate, whose idea was it to let kids in a vulnerable area there?

Is that a zone that historically floods?

It's part of an area called "Flash Flood Alley". So I think your most relevant question is

If it was reasonably foreseeable what was the plan to mitigate this risk and why did it fail?

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If in doubt, please post it!


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