domain:betonit.substack.com
FistfullOfCrows
9m ago
I want my buildings on giant-fuck-off concrete/steel stilts engineered so hard that the wrath of god can't touch em.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
18m ago
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.
TitaniumButterfly
55m ago
This would make a great drunken assertion but it feels kinda random in context.
ABigGuy4U
44m ago
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.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
51m ago
Re. mysqldump, that's what we did last time we had to do this, but I was hoping there was a less manual way. You can do automate anything with enough scripts and DevOps duct tape, but I try to take zero maintenance options whenever I can because I have to scale my meager team and hiring is rough now (because our budget is shit).
Re. the security team, the tech details matter less than the perception. They're more of a compliance team than a security team. Such is life outside of Silicon Valley, sadly.
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 2460 = 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.
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