9 ms·

In the abstract, this doesn't bother me. The potential attack surface for terrorism is huge, and there is a lot of potential for damage (both loss of life and e

by D13Fd 6y ago

In the abstract, this doesn't bother me. The potential attack surface for terrorism is huge, and there is a lot of potential for damage (both loss of life and economic damage). Hurricanes are a fairly well understood phenomenon which tend to cause a lot of damage but in fairly limited ways (typically only to coastal cities, and typically with warning). It's not all that surprising that it may cost more to prepare for the huge and unknown variety of possible terrorist attacks as compared to the pretty well-known threat of hurricanes. To me, the more important thing is that we make sure they have adequate resources to address both kinds of disaster (as well as others). I don't really care which one is more expensive.

failrate 6y ago
Spoiler: FEMA does not do a good job at managing hurricane emergencies.
- malandrew 6y ago
  Spoiler: Many (but not all) people who live in the path of hurricanes do not do a good job at preparing for inevitable hurricane emergencies.
  - ohazi 6y ago
    It's a witty reply, but it essentially boils down to "just be less poor." Is this really the argument you want to make?
    - abduhl 6y ago
      GP does not mention money, wealth, or differences in populations due to either. I don’t understand how you landed on “just be less poor” as the thrust of his argument?
      - enraged_camel 6y ago
        It's unstated but very obvious, because people who aren't able to evacuate, or move away permanently, are those who are too poor to do so.
        read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        There are a lot of other reasons for not being able to move away even if you could afford it.
      - ABeeSea 6y ago
        Preparing for a hurricane in Florida means building a house entirely out of concrete, moving, or accepting you will lose a lot of your stuff at some point. All of those options cost a lot of money.
        read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        True, there are people who can't afford to prepare, but if few do it even among those that could afford it, then the point still stands.
        bluGill 6y ago
        You don't need to build out of concrete. In fact concrete isn't a great material to build from, it just happens that the mass needed to work around its limits also stand up to hurricane winds. Conventional stick framed houses do fine in hurricanes when engineered to modern building codes. You see it once in a while when modern houses are near old ones in a hurricane.
      - peglasaurus 6y ago
        I think we learn more about the assumptions of the complainer rather than who wrote the "witty reply". That and the spoiler can be applied to any number of people in government agencies who are meant to be taking precautions and setting up contingencies.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      abduhl is correct. Those who are not poor within a community should be prepared to help others in their community. As someone who is a director of engineering at a tech company in one of richest zip codes in the country, what have you done to prepare to help both yourself and others within your community that are more vulnerable such as the poor, elderly and infirm? Or will you be another helpless victim adding to the burden that FEMA responders will have to attend to? If you are not prepared yourself when you have the financial means and technical capacity to do so, you're taking away resources from those that actually need that support in the event of a disaster.
      - ohazi 6y ago
        You're missing or ignoring a long history of extreme poverty in the American South, and deliberate policy decisions to under-invest in those communities in order to maintain the status quo. Nobody in this thread is proposing that FEMA help idiots in their multi-million dollar Florida oceanfront mansions that regularly get decimated by hurricanes. Those people can and regularly do bail out and return to their other homes in California or Nevada at the first sign of trouble. Your stated position is not based on reality -- most rich people do very little to help their communities. But even ignoring this fact -- random towns along the Mississippi coast don't have a lot of lawyers or doctors or directors of engineering with overflowing bags of money to graciously spend on their community, even if such philanthropy was common (which, again -- it isn't). Everyone in those communities is poor, and struggles to get by during good times. That's what FEMA is supposed to be for. And under-investment in FEMA's hurricane preparedness is yet another deliberate policy decision to throw these poorer communities under the bus, in favor of the wealthier communities where terrorists seeking visibility are expected to focus their efforts.
        malandrew 6y ago
        > deliberate policy decisions to under-invest in those communities You're missing or ignoring the fact that government is funded by economic activity. The government invests in protecting the revenues streams that allows it to continue to operate with surplus and those communities that don't provide much if any revenue benefit disproportionately relative to how much they contribute to funding the government they rely on for help. What you're proposing is to divert dollars from activity that creates the very surplus that affords the government the budget to help those that can't help themselves. Pretty much all countries cannot provide even a fraction of the support the US is able to provide to its disadvantaged communities. This is largely due to the fact that our government makes the smart decision to protect its cash cows. We have so much surplus that we're actually able to provide to many disadvantaged and advantaged communities beyond our own borders. We can of course debate the particulars of how much goes to protect the cash cows and how much goes to the communities less capable of contributing, but what's not up for debate is that the optimal solution we should both be solving for is the one that creates the greatest surplus. Many of these poorer communities are often better prepared than the cities where well off people are. During Katrina, much of the support rendered came from people outside the city that are self-reliant. They even had a name for these people, the Cajun Navy and they did far more to help the poor people in New Orleans than the rich people in New Orleans. So I ask you again, as someone who is a director of engineering at a tech company in one of richest zip codes in the country, what have you done to prepare to help both yourself and others within your community that are more vulnerable such as the poor, elderly and infirm? Or will you be another helpless victim adding to the burden that FEMA responders will have to attend to?
  - inscionent 6y ago
    Stated another way; Many (but not all) people who live in the path of hurricanes need more support from FEMA.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      Many people need to take more responsibility. I live in a place on the Pacific Rim with tsunami, earthquake and volcano risk. I have a massive mobile first aid kit, equipment/training for swiftwater rescue, baofeng radios, etc. When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes. It's a shame that we've strayed so far from "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country". Replace country with neighborhood, community, town, city, county, so on and so forth. FEMA is a great extra layer of safety, but it's no replacement for community preparedness. FEMA's effectiveness is proportional to the preparedness of the community it is called in to help. FEMA is also a SPOF. Everyone should operate under "No one is coming. It's up to us". When you assume the opposite, you create the conditions that greatly reduce the likelihood of a positive outcome in the event of disaster. You also consume resources that could have gone to people that do not have the means to prepare such as the poor, the elderly and the infirm.
      - vharuck 6y ago
        >When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes. That's a government: a community that pools resources, creates plans, and executes those plans to benefit the community members. I agree it would help for individuals to have emergency kits and some training. Why can't FEMA help with that?
        malandrew 6y ago
        > I agree it would help for individuals to have emergency kits and some training. You have it reversed. FEMA is the help. You and your neighbors are the first line of response in any real emergency. In the event of a tsunami hitting the Pacific Northwest, it's expected that many communities may be unreachable for a week or longer. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big... "In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America, outside of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed upward of a hundred thousand people. By comparison, roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million." No federal response will ever be capable of effectively responding to such a disaster without serious local support.
- chiph 6y ago
  As someone living in hurricane country, the joke around here is that FEMA stands for "Futilely Expecting Meaningful Aid". But really, their job is coordination, and usually will only contribute relief supplies if the state or county/parish is overwhelmed. They have a problem with people expecting too much from them - they are not going to show up in a convoy of trucks with food & water the very next day. But Wal-Mart, HEB, and Waffle House do a fantastic job of post-storm logistics, once the roads & bridges are open. Anyone who has lived here more than a few years knows that they should prepare for the season and have important papers ready to carry with you, 2 weeks of water & food on hand, etc. but human nature being what it is, many don't. A good site that can help you prepare is https://www.ready.gov/ https://www.ready.gov/ Check with your relatives and neighbors to make sure they've got the supplies they need or a way to evacuate ahead of the storm.
malandrew 6y ago
I had the same reaction. Hurricanes are not only well understood, they are also something that every single citizen living in a coastal city knows is inevitable and frequent enough that they take the precautions personally for dealing with them. They also strike with anticipation, so after you've secured your personal property and made sure you haven't built in a flood plain like a responsible citizen, you have plenty of time to evacuate if/when one is going to make landfall where you live. Terrorism can strike without warning and the same preparations for terrorism would help in disasters like the blast in Beirut.
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  I was just about to post a snide comment "Well not every coastal citizen needs to worry about them at least up to now. Seattle doesn't have...". But darn Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Pacific_Northwest_hurricane https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Pacific_Northwest_hurri...
  - malandrew 6y ago
    Preparedness for tsunami and earthquake risk is adequate for hurricane risk. The only phenomena not accounted for is high winds and the only form of preparation I can think of there is housing code that requires roofs to be tied down to supporting walls. Having been through many hurricanes including two category 5 hurricanes that downgraded to 4 by the time they reached me, I can't imagine that after a hurricane crosses the olympic peninsula it would still be much of a concern for roofing. For those on the coast the calculus may be different.
- morsch 6y ago
  You propose that people should look after themselves, and their belonings. Presumably some of the things people need to do in preparation for a hurricane benefit from economies of scale. Temporary shelter, preparing for rescue operations, structural engineering, stocking of supplies. People would probably be well advised to band together in some sort of emergency management cooperative to share expenses and increase efficiency.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
> The potential attack surface for terrorism is huge, and there is a lot of potential for damage (both loss of life and economic damage). I have heard quite a few strong arguments for how different pieces of vital infrastructure require extra protection from terrorism and also for military defence (power, hospitals, water treatment, banking, data centres, etc.). However, from my albeit limited experience, I feel like the vast majority of terrorism is very low tech and unambitious. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that in US in the last 20 years, the vast majority of terrorist attacks are shootings, followed by starting fires and bombs. What can you realistically do with a grant to prevent these from happening? > $14 million has been sought for law enforcement communication, SWAT training, and bomb detection [in Florida 2019-2020]. This is just one example from the article, but my gut instinct is that you could save many more lives and much more infrastructure spending that on preparing for natural disasters rather than terrorism - especially in a state that had tens of billions of damage a year earlier. Both are important, but I think public budgets should be carefully scruntinised - this smells of corruption and/or "defence theatre".
- droopyEyelids 6y ago
  The most fearsome terrorist attack, in my mind, is the "VRA" Vehicle Ramming Attack. A vehicle is such a high energy, dangerous piece of equipment. Our whole society, at least in North America, is built on the idea that people treasure their vehicles and will never act in a way that damages them. To my eyes, that is the type of assumption that makes an ass out of everyone. The gun control debate pales in comparison to what would happen if people decide their terroristic point is worth their life, and they have a car. And even kids have cars. We've got no protection against it. Only the shared cooperation of our society- and for whatever reason, people of late seem to be working to tear apart that cooperative fabric of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack
  - tweetle_beetle 6y ago
    Agreed, and I think VRAs sum up the futility of trying to prepare for terrorism. Yes we now have a few concrete blocks around a few specific areas in a few city centres to make everyone feel better, but that article lists 28 notable VRA attacks in the last 10 years in the _whole world_. The attack surface is impossibly large, and no amount of "law enforcement communication, SWAT training, and bomb detection" is going to reduce it.

by D13Fd 6y ago

failrate 6y ago

Spoiler: FEMA does not do a good job at managing hurricane emergencies.

malandrew 6y ago
Spoiler: Many (but not all) people who live in the path of hurricanes do not do a good job at preparing for inevitable hurricane emergencies.
- ohazi 6y ago
  It's a witty reply, but it essentially boils down to "just be less poor." Is this really the argument you want to make?
  - abduhl 6y ago
    GP does not mention money, wealth, or differences in populations due to either. I don’t understand how you landed on “just be less poor” as the thrust of his argument?
    - enraged_camel 6y ago
      It's unstated but very obvious, because people who aren't able to evacuate, or move away permanently, are those who are too poor to do so.
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        There are a lot of other reasons for not being able to move away even if you could afford it.
    - ABeeSea 6y ago
      Preparing for a hurricane in Florida means building a house entirely out of concrete, moving, or accepting you will lose a lot of your stuff at some point. All of those options cost a lot of money.
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        True, there are people who can't afford to prepare, but if few do it even among those that could afford it, then the point still stands.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        You don't need to build out of concrete. In fact concrete isn't a great material to build from, it just happens that the mass needed to work around its limits also stand up to hurricane winds. Conventional stick framed houses do fine in hurricanes when engineered to modern building codes. You see it once in a while when modern houses are near old ones in a hurricane.
    - peglasaurus 6y ago
      I think we learn more about the assumptions of the complainer rather than who wrote the "witty reply". That and the spoiler can be applied to any number of people in government agencies who are meant to be taking precautions and setting up contingencies.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    abduhl is correct. Those who are not poor within a community should be prepared to help others in their community. As someone who is a director of engineering at a tech company in one of richest zip codes in the country, what have you done to prepare to help both yourself and others within your community that are more vulnerable such as the poor, elderly and infirm? Or will you be another helpless victim adding to the burden that FEMA responders will have to attend to? If you are not prepared yourself when you have the financial means and technical capacity to do so, you're taking away resources from those that actually need that support in the event of a disaster.
    - ohazi 6y ago
      You're missing or ignoring a long history of extreme poverty in the American South, and deliberate policy decisions to under-invest in those communities in order to maintain the status quo. Nobody in this thread is proposing that FEMA help idiots in their multi-million dollar Florida oceanfront mansions that regularly get decimated by hurricanes. Those people can and regularly do bail out and return to their other homes in California or Nevada at the first sign of trouble. Your stated position is not based on reality -- most rich people do very little to help their communities. But even ignoring this fact -- random towns along the Mississippi coast don't have a lot of lawyers or doctors or directors of engineering with overflowing bags of money to graciously spend on their community, even if such philanthropy was common (which, again -- it isn't). Everyone in those communities is poor, and struggles to get by during good times. That's what FEMA is supposed to be for. And under-investment in FEMA's hurricane preparedness is yet another deliberate policy decision to throw these poorer communities under the bus, in favor of the wealthier communities where terrorists seeking visibility are expected to focus their efforts.
      - malandrew 6y ago
        > deliberate policy decisions to under-invest in those communities You're missing or ignoring the fact that government is funded by economic activity. The government invests in protecting the revenues streams that allows it to continue to operate with surplus and those communities that don't provide much if any revenue benefit disproportionately relative to how much they contribute to funding the government they rely on for help. What you're proposing is to divert dollars from activity that creates the very surplus that affords the government the budget to help those that can't help themselves. Pretty much all countries cannot provide even a fraction of the support the US is able to provide to its disadvantaged communities. This is largely due to the fact that our government makes the smart decision to protect its cash cows. We have so much surplus that we're actually able to provide to many disadvantaged and advantaged communities beyond our own borders. We can of course debate the particulars of how much goes to protect the cash cows and how much goes to the communities less capable of contributing, but what's not up for debate is that the optimal solution we should both be solving for is the one that creates the greatest surplus. Many of these poorer communities are often better prepared than the cities where well off people are. During Katrina, much of the support rendered came from people outside the city that are self-reliant. They even had a name for these people, the Cajun Navy and they did far more to help the poor people in New Orleans than the rich people in New Orleans. So I ask you again, as someone who is a director of engineering at a tech company in one of richest zip codes in the country, what have you done to prepare to help both yourself and others within your community that are more vulnerable such as the poor, elderly and infirm? Or will you be another helpless victim adding to the burden that FEMA responders will have to attend to?
- inscionent 6y ago
  Stated another way; Many (but not all) people who live in the path of hurricanes need more support from FEMA.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    Many people need to take more responsibility. I live in a place on the Pacific Rim with tsunami, earthquake and volcano risk. I have a massive mobile first aid kit, equipment/training for swiftwater rescue, baofeng radios, etc. When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes. It's a shame that we've strayed so far from "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country". Replace country with neighborhood, community, town, city, county, so on and so forth. FEMA is a great extra layer of safety, but it's no replacement for community preparedness. FEMA's effectiveness is proportional to the preparedness of the community it is called in to help. FEMA is also a SPOF. Everyone should operate under "No one is coming. It's up to us". When you assume the opposite, you create the conditions that greatly reduce the likelihood of a positive outcome in the event of disaster. You also consume resources that could have gone to people that do not have the means to prepare such as the poor, the elderly and the infirm.
    - vharuck 6y ago
      >When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes. That's a government: a community that pools resources, creates plans, and executes those plans to benefit the community members. I agree it would help for individuals to have emergency kits and some training. Why can't FEMA help with that?
      - malandrew 6y ago
        > I agree it would help for individuals to have emergency kits and some training. You have it reversed. FEMA is the help. You and your neighbors are the first line of response in any real emergency. In the event of a tsunami hitting the Pacific Northwest, it's expected that many communities may be unreachable for a week or longer. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big... "In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America, outside of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed upward of a hundred thousand people. By comparison, roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million." No federal response will ever be capable of effectively responding to such a disaster without serious local support.
chiph 6y ago
As someone living in hurricane country, the joke around here is that FEMA stands for "Futilely Expecting Meaningful Aid". But really, their job is coordination, and usually will only contribute relief supplies if the state or county/parish is overwhelmed. They have a problem with people expecting too much from them - they are not going to show up in a convoy of trucks with food & water the very next day. But Wal-Mart, HEB, and Waffle House do a fantastic job of post-storm logistics, once the roads & bridges are open. Anyone who has lived here more than a few years knows that they should prepare for the season and have important papers ready to carry with you, 2 weeks of water & food on hand, etc. but human nature being what it is, many don't. A good site that can help you prepare is https://www.ready.gov/ https://www.ready.gov/ Check with your relatives and neighbors to make sure they've got the supplies they need or a way to evacuate ahead of the storm.

malandrew 6y ago

I had the same reaction. Hurricanes are not only well understood, they are also something that every single citizen living in a coastal city knows is inevitable and frequent enough that they take the precautions personally for dealing with them. They also strike with anticipation, so after you've secured your personal property and made sure you haven't built in a flood plain like a responsible citizen, you have plenty of time to evacuate if/when one is going to make landfall where you live. Terrorism can strike without warning and the same preparations for terrorism would help in disasters like the blast in Beirut.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago
I was just about to post a snide comment "Well not every coastal citizen needs to worry about them at least up to now. Seattle doesn't have...". But darn Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Pacific_Northwest_hurricane https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Pacific_Northwest_hurri...
- malandrew 6y ago
  Preparedness for tsunami and earthquake risk is adequate for hurricane risk. The only phenomena not accounted for is high winds and the only form of preparation I can think of there is housing code that requires roofs to be tied down to supporting walls. Having been through many hurricanes including two category 5 hurricanes that downgraded to 4 by the time they reached me, I can't imagine that after a hurricane crosses the olympic peninsula it would still be much of a concern for roofing. For those on the coast the calculus may be different.
morsch 6y ago
You propose that people should look after themselves, and their belonings. Presumably some of the things people need to do in preparation for a hurricane benefit from economies of scale. Temporary shelter, preparing for rescue operations, structural engineering, stocking of supplies. People would probably be well advised to band together in some sort of emergency management cooperative to share expenses and increase efficiency.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

> The potential attack surface for terrorism is huge, and there is a lot of potential for damage (both loss of life and economic damage). I have heard quite a few strong arguments for how different pieces of vital infrastructure require extra protection from terrorism and also for military defence (power, hospitals, water treatment, banking, data centres, etc.). However, from my albeit limited experience, I feel like the vast majority of terrorism is very low tech and unambitious. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that in US in the last 20 years, the vast majority of terrorist attacks are shootings, followed by starting fires and bombs. What can you realistically do with a grant to prevent these from happening? > $14 million has been sought for law enforcement communication, SWAT training, and bomb detection [in Florida 2019-2020]. This is just one example from the article, but my gut instinct is that you could save many more lives and much more infrastructure spending that on preparing for natural disasters rather than terrorism - especially in a state that had tens of billions of damage a year earlier. Both are important, but I think public budgets should be carefully scruntinised - this smells of corruption and/or "defence theatre".

droopyEyelids 6y ago
The most fearsome terrorist attack, in my mind, is the "VRA" Vehicle Ramming Attack. A vehicle is such a high energy, dangerous piece of equipment. Our whole society, at least in North America, is built on the idea that people treasure their vehicles and will never act in a way that damages them. To my eyes, that is the type of assumption that makes an ass out of everyone. The gun control debate pales in comparison to what would happen if people decide their terroristic point is worth their life, and they have a car. And even kids have cars. We've got no protection against it. Only the shared cooperation of our society- and for whatever reason, people of late seem to be working to tear apart that cooperative fabric of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  Agreed, and I think VRAs sum up the futility of trying to prepare for terrorism. Yes we now have a few concrete blocks around a few specific areas in a few city centres to make everyone feel better, but that article lists 28 notable VRA attacks in the last 10 years in the _whole world_. The attack surface is impossibly large, and no amount of "law enforcement communication, SWAT training, and bomb detection" is going to reduce it.