domain:cspicenter.com
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.
miras_chinotto
certified low iq
7hr ago
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.
StJohnOfPatmos
1hr ago
Well, isn't that part the crux though? It's not that the "art scene" that only asks for craftsmanship is good, but that the "art scene" that does not ask for craftsmanship is bad. It's the same situation as with poetry and philosophy - technical requirements, whether it's the ability to paint well, to stick to a meter and rhyme in a way that tickles the unexpectedness sense, or to write out your argument formally, are useful because they filter out the uncommitted, the generally incompetent and those whose comparative advantage lies primarily in the social game of becoming respected in a subculture.
This is completely true, and it's an argument against the point the original essay was making. The democratisation of art has diluted technical and formal criteria by dismantling traditional forms of gatekeeping - not some new-found elitism.
Poetry's downfall in particular which you mention seems to me to be suffering from a similar issue - our elites aren't reading anymore and have little meaningful exposure to the great classics of Western poetry. The Rupi Kaur-style of poetry is successful because it is extremely undemanding to read and easy to consume, perfectly fit for a society that acquired Ivy League Humanities degrees by using Sparknotes and summarized bullet points to interact with a Lord Byron poem. There is a stunning lack of snobbishness even in our most elite universities.
The golden age of art, indeed, seems to have been the period between the 17th and early 20th century, when craftsmanship was still required but no longer considered sufficient. (Some exceptions before that from good craftsmen that coincidentally also had interesting artistic visions, e.g. Bosch.)
I find the concept of a "golden age of art" overly ambitious and reductive, but it makes for a fun dinner party conversation. Your periodisation leaves out the entire Gothic period and the Renaissance, not to speak of Classical Antiquity and Ancient Rome, so I have trouble getting on board with it as the decisive high watermark of art. I also find much of the 18th Century to be a relative low point in the Western tradition of painting before 1900, but I think that's largely a matter of taste.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
1hr ago
If the train is a metaphor for direction the government is going, than I'm not sure that America is that different. If America's train is heading for a cliff, I also have no possible control over it or ability to stop it. That train also won't stop for me, and will happily drag me to my death if I interact with the door mechanism wrong or whatever the equivalent metaphor is.
The biggest difference I see is that Chinas train is piloted by a single conductor who appears to be sane and fairly smart. So I think that train will be safe until he dies, and then yeah, huge potential for disaster as a new pilot is selected and possibly a bad or evil one.
versus America's train, there barely is a pilot at all, and to the extent their is a pilot he gets replaced very often and the new one is selected by a people I don't trust, interacting with entrenched and sinister factions in esoteric ways.
At least until Xi dies, I think that the China train sounds like that safer bet.
Obviously I'm not going to move there, the American train is more luxury, and I've already paid for a nice cabin. But I'm not convinced our conductors are likely to be better than theirs.
faceh
7hr ago
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.
yunyun333
10hr ago
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.
FtttG
1hr ago
Every month in our office canteen, a member of the HR team hangs up posters on the noticeboard of notable days or commemorations which fall within that calendar month. For July, these included World Friendship Day (July 30th), Nelson Mandela's birthday (July 18th) and World Chocolate Day (today). There's also International Non-Binary People's Day, which it will not surprise you to learn made me roll my eyes (the aforementioned member of the HR team had only just taken down the innumerable pride flags festooning the office for the duration of June, but apparently we need an extra day outside of that just for the they/thems). But what interested me was that International Non-Binary People's Day falls on July 14th, the same day as Bastille Day. There's an implicit hierarchy here, wherein the HR department are tacitly insinuating that non-binary people deserve international commemoration in a way that French people don't.
HighResolutionSleep
11hr ago
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.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
8hr ago
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.
philosoraptor
1hr ago
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.
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?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
I don't use and never have used apps for various reasons (mostly age) but this is a very detailed post of reasonable advice, good on you taking the time.
FistfullOfCrows
3hr ago
I want my buildings on giant-fuck-off concrete/steel stilts engineered so hard that the wrath of god can't touch em.
TowardsPanna
2hr ago
That's a lotta books... :(
I haven't read Cialdini yet. I actually got it, read a tiny bit, but was hit with a moral concern that it's wrong to 'manipulate' people. I guess I should discard that concern, since everyone else who gets shit done is doing it.
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_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
11hr ago
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?
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
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.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
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.
ABigGuy4U
4hr 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.
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.
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".
Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.
But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.
(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)
Quantumfreakonomics
12hr ago
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.
clo
8hr ago
This is very weird to me because this is heavily colored by recency bias. China looks like this because this is intentional. Their realpolitik and pragmatism is born out of fire, revolution, infighting over the levers of power and millions dead.
The reasons people like to hold up for China's success - their uniparty, the absolute dominance of the governing power, their zero-tolerance model of governance, their model of state and local governments, their high-IQ population - are also reasons to doubt them.
China has unique strengths, but also unique weaknesses. The Party is bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and bloodless transitions of power are not guaranteed. Local governance lies, schmoozes, and fakes numbers to look good to state governance. Measures are targets. Their state capacity leaves other states green with envy. But for all the bemoaning that You Can Just Do Things, or that the Chinese Government Can Just Do Things, the corollary is that the Government Can Just Do Things to You.
They're facing some genuinely difficult problems now; real estate collapse, the income trap, historical weakness in domestic consumption, demographic issues with tax base + aging population. It's too early to call the Chinese century. But broad policy strokes can affect billions.
The best way to understand this is that in China, the trains will not stop for you, even if you get caught in the doors. It'll drag you for miles, uncaring of if you become a corpse or not. And you have little control over where the train is going. It may lead to a prosperous, stable future, but if it doesn't and the train is headed for a cliff, what control could you possibly have over it, short of killing your way to the front?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8hr ago
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.
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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