domain:alexberenson.substack.com
TitaniumButterfly
5m ago
Could be. The other thing is that I lived in a lot of other places (including East Asia) for a few years at a time and in retrospect a lot of those memories are from there and also getting conflated with typhoons e.g. And we'd travel a lot in the DC area which seems to have a lot more storms.
Just recalled that some of the 'majestic primal thunder' I'm recalling may have been that time a windborne dumpster fell out of the sky next to our house in Siquijor.
quiet_NaN
11m ago
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.
faceh
17m ago
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.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23m ago
Oof, sorry to hear that you're not enjoying Dungeon Slayer, and I'm afraid this is where my "cheap date" reader self doesn't necessarily do me any favors when I talk about series that I've enjoyed. It's a low bar! It's been maybe a couple of years now since I read the first few books and what I remember really liking about it was, in fact, the fight scenes and also the world-building, not just
On the 12 Miles front, yeah, developing To'Wrathh's character was annoying AF to me, too, though I understand the major plot points that revolve around her character making that necessary to a certain extent. A lot of her early stuff was just bloody annoying to me, though it did get better over time. To me, 12 Miles is at its best when it's exploring its world, particularly the underground sections, and at its dreariest when it's doing its developmental/consolidation bits. I can tell you that book 5 to me was largely one of those so I'd say there's no need to rush in picking up the audiobook when it becomes available. Regardless, I'm glad you're enjoying that one!
I appreciate the Seth Ring recommendation, Kindle pimps out his Battle Mage Farmer stuff to me semi-regularly because of a similar series that I read in the past. I have another series or three that I bought to make me immune to wanting to read another one of those but I might check out Iron Tyrant--it sounds interesting and more up my alley (that whole what will he do with the premise thing) than another "exploit the farmer class" style of LitRPG.
faceh
24m ago
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).
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.
pigeonburger
34m ago
I don't know about them coming back, I've had one most of my adult life, at different levels of kemptness (as of now, decently trimmed). At first it was because I was conforming to hipster fashion. I've experimented with my facial hair a fair bit, I've had handlebars even at some point. But now my wife would divorce me if I shaved my beard, and it conforms to image I have of myself, as a gruff and stern looking.
I'm also a sysadmin, so it's basically a uniform for me.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
44m ago
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.
Quantumfreakonomics
48m ago
Use good photos of yourself. Digging any deeper than that will make you go insane. Most people here are reasonably-high decouplers, but it hits differently when it’s your appearance and your social status and your geneline at stake.
pigeonburger
49m ago
Great advice list! Couldn't have said it better myself. Ultimately the overarching goal is communicating that you're a well-rounded and well-adjusted guy, everything you do on these apps should be done with that in mind and your advice goes a long way towards giving tips as to how to do so.
sodiummuffin
51m ago
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.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
57m ago
I've never used anything but FancyZones and HOLY SHIT it is amazing.
Although I just jumped to Windows 11 and it's FancyZones-lite native feature is pretty good too.
faceh
1hr ago
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.
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.
cjet79
1hr ago
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.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
futility of enforcement
I actually think enforcement for this is incredibly easy.
I live in downtown Toronto, I have a dog. My neighborhood is overrun with dogs as it's all mid/late 20s yuppies in condos that are too small for kids.
There was a park that became an unofficial dog off-leash park while the nearby dog park was renovated for a year. Once the dog park opened people didn't stop going to the "unofficial" one. Eventually, by-law officers started doing occasional driveby's, and would attempt to ticket people. I have no idea if they actually ticketed anyone, but it had a profound chilling effect on people using that park as an offleash area.
And they half-assed it! Just hire more by-law officers and have them circulate. The evidence is clear, people do NOT respond to the severity of punishment, anyone breaking rules breaks them without worrying about the consequences as they think they wont get caught. What changes behavior is the assessed risk % of getting caught. So increase enforcement in a visible way, and watch people adapt.
The problem is, that requires taking action and doing things, and western governments at all levels are profoundly allergic to doing things.
This is a side note, but I actually had an incredibly sad related moment last winter. My girlfriend, dog, and I were walking through a park that has a skating rink. The Zamboni had created a snow mountain beside it. I have incredibly fond memories of playing on these as a kid. It was surrounded by other optimal parent age young adults like us, all letting their dogs play on the snow mountain. There were no children in sight anywhere in the park (it was morning, to be fair). Our dog had a great time running around it, but holy fuck was it sad seeing such a visual representation of the collapse in our societies fertility.
faceh
1hr ago
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.
mr_bailey
1hr ago
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.
mr_bailey
1hr ago
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.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
ha I'm more the opposite. The shell script is legible and easier to reason about. Using some GCP widget is going to not work for some mysterious reason and getting help impossible if the docs don't cover your use case.
mr_bailey
1hr ago
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.
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
I tried giving Worth the Candle a shot, but didn't like it. Maybe it will be subverted later on, but in the first book I found the implied worldview of the author not self-aware enough, sometimes bordering on the comical, which is especially bad considering that it's obvious the author wants to go for something more philosophical. The basic internal story was OK, good enough so that I finished book 1 without feeling like it was a slog, but I also have very little motivation to carry on. So, I guess it's at least still better than the Wandering Inn, which did turn into a slog just a few chapters in.
mr_bailey
1hr ago
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.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
The only regress of grievances offered is one that exists at the pleasure of the sovereign and can be abolished at will.
Let's again go back to the analogy. If a parent with a maximally-oppositional child or a board game master with a maximally-oppositional player decides to press with their rule, what redress of grievances is available other than their pleasure? Yes, they can at will decide to give up on enforcement of the rule. There are tons of examples of that happening with the government, too. Moreover, there are many overlapping methods of petition for redress of grievances in a system like what the US has. That was kind of an important part of the founding movement. One might not like them; one might not think they are working in the way that they "should", but that is a separate matter from the mere question of what is required to state that all government rules are uniquely enforced by violence/kidnapping. You need to posit other things like maximal-opposition. In fact, if you ask someone who makes such a claim how they end up in such a situation, they almost by necessity appeal to maximal-opposition. "This rule seems to be enforced by a $5 fine, not violence/kidnapping." "Well, what if you don't pay that fine?" "The next step is X." "What happens if they refuse to comply with X?" "The next step is Y." "...what happens if they refuse to comply with Y?" And so on and so forth until you get to the point where violence/kidnapping occurs. There may be offramps along the way, but they all tend to be ignored in such reasoning. I'm simply pointing out that if we apply the same reasoning to essentially any other rule in the world, you either have to posit an offramp occurring, or you still end up in violence/kidnapping. Fewer people are quite as willing to think about this and apply the same reasoning to any other rule in the world.
There is a bit of a Clauswitzian feel to this reasoning. Any time you're trying to enforce any rule, either someone backs down, comes to an agreement or something, or escalates further. If we take any conflict over anything that seems like 'rule enforcement', if parties are willing to escalate and go further in their maximal opposition, you end up in warfare/violence. Politics is just one form of conflict management, but just as sure as war is politics by other means, violence in general is conflict management/"rule enforcement" by other means. Just take almost any example of a rule you want to enforce and walk through the exact same steps of, "Well, what if they're maximally-oppositional?"
Finally, to be completely clear, this is not an argument "against libertarianism". It is simply bringing clarity to the nature of one particular type of argument.
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.
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