domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Seems like reading really deep into very little.
I know people who approximately look like this type. Aging, balding white guy with beard. I have no complaints about their looks or character.
Could use more exercise and less food. True, but also true for most Americans their age.
TIRM
7m ago
Agreed. I look nothing like those guys and have no complaints. Aging white guys with beards, some balding. Seems pretty typical to me.
FistfullOfCrows
20m ago
I want my buildings on giant-fuck-off concrete/steel stilts engineered so hard that the wrath of god can't touch em.
miras_chinotto
certified low iq
4hr 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.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
29m 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
1hr ago
This would make a great drunken assertion but it feels kinda random in context.
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.
faceh
4hr 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
6hr 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.
ABigGuy4U
54m 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_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3hr ago
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...
HighResolutionSleep
7hr 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.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
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.
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.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr 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.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
5hr 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.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1hr 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.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
8hr 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?
OliveTapenade
4hr 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.)
quiet_NaN
7hr 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.
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.
clo
4hr 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?
Quantumfreakonomics
9hr 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.
ZanarkandAbesFan
1hr ago
Was this meant as a reply to me or OP?
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.
More options
Context Copy link