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You have a completely fantasy idea of how successful communities are established, grown and sustained. They are not unlike startups and other businesses. Ther

You have a completely fantasy idea of how successful communities are established, grown and sustained. They are not unlike startups and other businesses. There's first group of settlers who found a settlement. There are others who come later and grow a settlement into a town. Still more join later to grow a town into city, so on and so forth. Every step of the way, people come and join the community chasing social and economic reasons to join the community. The economic and social reasons are provided by those already in the community by way of their contributions to that community in the form of establishing economic activity and contributing to sustainable growth. Like startups and businesses, outside capital and support can help, but alone will not lead to their sustainability and growth. Until we solve some fundamental limiters like limitless free energy, there will always be more demand for support and aid than there will be support and aid available. This means that those providing aid and support, just like venture capital and private equity, need to pick and choose where to provide support to maximize the utility from that support. Some communities just don't have the core nugget of what is necessary to make it worth rendering aid and support beyond the minimum. For those communities, it's best to allow those within the unsustainable community to move to other communities with sustainable opportunities. Every successful community from town to city, is successful because its members inherently provides for its own sustainability. Those communities that are not sustainable are doomed to peter out. Any support beyond helping the members of unsustainable communities to sustainable ones is just throwing good money after bad. Outside support alone will never magically turn any community into a prosperous community. That kind of thinking is what produces businesses like WeWork. > I am prepared to take care of myself and my family in the event of the disasters that we expect in California, including earthquakes and the fires that are currently surrounding my city. I'm curious how? Just evacuating yourself to other areas that can provide resources? What about people near you that may need help being evacuated well before FEMA can render aid such as with wildfires? > I have resources that I can provide to my family Are we only discussing money and a vehicle? Is the tank always full? > But who do you consider to be part of my community? In a major disaster, all communities are local. These are very real people that you're going to personally see that will need urgent assistance to avoid injury or death. If something happens to your "preparations", you could find yourself in the position where you or your family needs urgent assistance to avoid injury or death. > The levels of philanthropy that you expect the poor to rely on are completely delusional, and that's why we need FEMA. They really aren't. You've just never experienced a local community that does more to provide for one another. It's not uncommon for city dwellers to have this attitude. FEMA is a federal organization whose effectiveness is bounded by local response. They are not a wholesale replacement for local response. Every FEMA failure that's happened in my life began as a failure of local response. > we're all monsters, and will leave our neighbors to drown without a second thought. Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail. > Governments and larger scale philanthropies with the capacity and resources for meta-thinking and longer-term investment are the only organizations that are capable of responding in a sustainable way. The Cajun Navy is exactly the opposite of that and was far more effective during Hurricane Katrina. In many disasters, it's amateur HAM radio operators that provide critical communications infrastructure to aid federal responses. It's local SAR volunteers that provide help such as swiftwater rescue. In a disaster, most urgent first aid is rendered by amateurs until someone can be brought to a medical facility because EMTs and other first responders are overwhelmed.

nicoffeine 6y ago
> Until we solve some fundamental limiters like limitless free energy, there will always be more demand for support and aid than there will be support and aid available. This means that those providing aid and support, just like venture capital and private equity, need to pick and choose where to provide support to maximize the utility from that support. This is a ridiculous statement. We literally helped rebuild Europe and Japan after WWII while growing our economy. Are you saying there are less energy and resources available 70 years later? Or that we would have been better off letting Europe fall into another post-war depression? The sad irony is that practically every economy that we helped rebuild in that time now provides meaningful services for all of their citizens, including education, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, food, and protection from natural disasters. America has enough to provide basic services to everyone, but chooses not to based on deeply flawed morality excused with insane economic theory: socialism for the rich, and capitalism for everyone else.
ohazi 6y ago
> Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail. So in one breath you criticize me for being a cynic, and in the next you admit that my cynical attitude is prevalent enough to be the root cause of the bad things I said would happen as a result? I never claimed it was a good attitude, I claimed that it was the dominant one. Most people can be relied on to be selfish in stressful situations. Are there instances where we all come together during trying times and help each other and do the whole inspirational humanity thing? Sure. But these situations are inspirational because they're not the norm. We should expect people to exhibit the typical attitude rather than the ideal one when designing our national disaster response policy. > outside capital and support can help, but alone will not lead to their sustainability and growth. This is plainly false. There are hundreds of counter examples all over the world, both today and throughout history. China, in spite of their other faults, has been doing this with multiple cities a year since the 90s, dragging tens of millions of people out of poverty in the process. For these investments to work, they need to be sustained -- you can't turn the spigot on and off every four years. They need to be real investments, and sized appropriately -- lip service doesn't work. And it usually takes the better part of a generation for the improvements to materialize. > Every step of the way, people come and join the community chasing social and economic reasons to join the community. Now this is fantasy. Are you not aware of how many of the black communities in the South came to be, or why they ended up so impoverished? It didn't go anything like this. First we dragged people here against their will on slave ships. This lasted for 300 years. Then we ended slavery, but the slavers and their descendants were bitter about losing the war and had deeply held ideas about race, so they worked diligently to prevent the black community from prospering as a matter of policy via violence, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, redlining, unbalanced enforcement, etc. plenty of which continues to this day. This is not lack of investment or lack of personal motivation, this is active sabotage. These communities are poor because they started out with nothing, and we've been curbstomping them for over a century. > Some communities just don't have the core nugget of what is necessary to make it worth rendering aid This is such a ridiculous take. These communities don't have what it takes? They weren't given the chance. Every time something good happened there, we came in and took it away. The main issue I have with your original comment is that you're basically telling people in these communities -- people who can barely afford to keep a roof over their head, let alone save for hurricane preparations or for a big move -- "Gee, you should have planned better for this hurricane," "Gee, if you can't plan better, maybe you should get up and move," "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, mate." The majority of the communities at the receiving end of the now annual hurricane are black and poor, and we are the reason they've been too poor to do any of that. Your comment is a tone-deaf slap in the face, and you are being rightly excoriated for it.

nicoffeine 6y ago

> Until we solve some fundamental limiters like limitless free energy, there will always be more demand for support and aid than there will be support and aid available. This means that those providing aid and support, just like venture capital and private equity, need to pick and choose where to provide support to maximize the utility from that support. This is a ridiculous statement. We literally helped rebuild Europe and Japan after WWII while growing our economy. Are you saying there are less energy and resources available 70 years later? Or that we would have been better off letting Europe fall into another post-war depression? The sad irony is that practically every economy that we helped rebuild in that time now provides meaningful services for all of their citizens, including education, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, food, and protection from natural disasters. America has enough to provide basic services to everyone, but chooses not to based on deeply flawed morality excused with insane economic theory: socialism for the rich, and capitalism for everyone else.

ohazi 6y ago

> Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail. So in one breath you criticize me for being a cynic, and in the next you admit that my cynical attitude is prevalent enough to be the root cause of the bad things I said would happen as a result? I never claimed it was a good attitude, I claimed that it was the dominant one. Most people can be relied on to be selfish in stressful situations. Are there instances where we all come together during trying times and help each other and do the whole inspirational humanity thing? Sure. But these situations are inspirational because they're not the norm. We should expect people to exhibit the typical attitude rather than the ideal one when designing our national disaster response policy. > outside capital and support can help, but alone will not lead to their sustainability and growth. This is plainly false. There are hundreds of counter examples all over the world, both today and throughout history. China, in spite of their other faults, has been doing this with multiple cities a year since the 90s, dragging tens of millions of people out of poverty in the process. For these investments to work, they need to be sustained -- you can't turn the spigot on and off every four years. They need to be real investments, and sized appropriately -- lip service doesn't work. And it usually takes the better part of a generation for the improvements to materialize. > Every step of the way, people come and join the community chasing social and economic reasons to join the community. Now this is fantasy. Are you not aware of how many of the black communities in the South came to be, or why they ended up so impoverished? It didn't go anything like this. First we dragged people here against their will on slave ships. This lasted for 300 years. Then we ended slavery, but the slavers and their descendants were bitter about losing the war and had deeply held ideas about race, so they worked diligently to prevent the black community from prospering as a matter of policy via violence, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, redlining, unbalanced enforcement, etc. plenty of which continues to this day. This is not lack of investment or lack of personal motivation, this is active sabotage. These communities are poor because they started out with nothing, and we've been curbstomping them for over a century. > Some communities just don't have the core nugget of what is necessary to make it worth rendering aid This is such a ridiculous take. These communities don't have what it takes? They weren't given the chance. Every time something good happened there, we came in and took it away. The main issue I have with your original comment is that you're basically telling people in these communities -- people who can barely afford to keep a roof over their head, let alone save for hurricane preparations or for a big move -- "Gee, you should have planned better for this hurricane," "Gee, if you can't plan better, maybe you should get up and move," "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, mate." The majority of the communities at the receiving end of the now annual hurricane are black and poor, and we are the reason they've been too poor to do any of that. Your comment is a tone-deaf slap in the face, and you are being rightly excoriated for it.