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A more realistic analogy would be if the engineer said it's very likely that the California coast will be hit with an earthquake sometime in the next 100 years,
by mcbits 9y ago
A more realistic analogy would be if the engineer said it's very likely that the California coast will be hit with an earthquake sometime in the next 100 years, but we have no idea when, which city, or how severe it will be. The safe thing to do would be to stop building things there altogether, but we could also try raising taxes and adding building regulations, making it impossibly expensive to live and work there. Surely that will stop people from building and moving there. 97% of engineers agree that earthquakes can be troubling.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mcbits 9y agoSomeone replied to me and deleted it, and I don't want to waste the time I spent writing a response, so here it is: No, that wasn't my claim. If I have a claim, it's that, instead of simply moving away, people keep building up an active seismic fault that's likely to suffer a catastrophic earthquake in the near future. Even high taxes (some of which funded the policy piece you cited) and massively increased costs of construction (such as proposed in the policy piece you cited) aren't incentive enough to stop. This aspect of human behavior is worth remembering when someone suggests similar "incentives" to address climate change. It's trying to incentivize the same mindset that would rather build cities out of springs and pendulums than move to stable land. We should face the reality that humans will eventually deal with the negative side of climate change using (not so?) metaphorical springs, levers, stilts, and who-knows-what, and it will be okay. I don't click Forbes links, but from the URL it looks like it's about a hoax bill that was proposed for PR purposes. Not interested.