This is why in the Netherlands they made a separate tax to pay for flood defense that the government can't touch.
Because every time the economy went down the drain the first things that got cut from the budget were the dikes (it's no coincidence the worst flood in history was in 1953 when the great recession, WW2 and colonial war drained the treasury).
And there's always another storm.
> On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
> That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
> The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not, but most kids do follow rules. Only a few have hacker spirit, which should be over represented here on Hacker News, but is not that prevalent in society.
"Some residents argued that outdoor sirens blaring warnings in the event of a flash flood would ruin the natural feel of the area that many prized. “The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of the night,” one county commissioner at the time, Buster Baldwin, said during a 2016 meeting. “I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.” (Mr. Baldwin died in 2022.)"
I'm thinking hard here, but I'm reasonably sure this is at least in the top-5 most moronic short-sighted, selfish, brain-dead things I've ever seen in my life. Possibly even top-3. Yeah, I'd join Buster in the bar to drink ourselves in a coma.
In fairness, a similar issue has traditionally existed with tornado warnings, which they likely have in that part of the US. Most of the people affected by the warning are not actually at risk because the warnings are poorly targeted or the risk doesn’t meaningfully materialize. Over time, people get warning fatigue and they start ignoring them. It becomes a “boy who cried wolf” situation which makes the loud sirens that much more of a nuisance.
The spam-y nature of many disaster warning systems is widely understood to be an issue. If these people have existing experience with other low hit-rate warning systems like for tornados, it isn’t surprising that they would find even more warnings to be a nuisance. The false positive rates that people experience is too high by an order of magnitude to be an effective system.
If they have warning sirens that are ineffective at conveying real risk, they stop being warnings and become background noise.
Several months ago, in Southern California, we had a cell phone earthquake alert.
Essentially it was “An earthquake is coming now, seek cover”.
I picked up my phone, read it, gave it a kind of WTH look, and, indeed, an earthquake hit. And it was a notable quake.
I rode out the quake at my desk.
And that’s the thing. Where I’m at, we get hit all the time. Rollers, shakers, slammers. We had a week or so last year where we got hit by a swarm of a dozen of them.
But they’re small. Close 3s. During the swarm, I felt for the folks about 2 miles away. All of them originated beneath them, so they were getting more than I was.
So, it’s hard to take an earthquake warning very seriously. First, I didn’t even know we had warnings. Second, we’re (I’m) used to just riding them out. With that kind of warning, all we can do is duck and cover, assume the worst, hope for the best.
I will say this, next time I get that warning, I’ll heed it. The quake that hit us was interesting enough to justify caution should they send another one, and, one way or another, it’s going to be over soon. So the overall precaution in response to the warning is quite low.
On the other hand, we also get the flash flood warnings. They’re broadcast over a huge area, 95+% of which is, honestly, not susceptible to the flooding.
These are long lasting warnings. With 12 hour durations. The most interesting one is the one for a local river basin. That warning goes off when crossing the river on the freeway.
There are certainly areas susceptible to flash floods. Lots of mountains and canyons. Especially in the foothills in the deserts. Down here in the greater LA, Orange, Inland Empire regions, it’s less of an issue. 100 years of development, dams, and flood control infrastructure actually do the job quite well.
Spamming us with flood alerts just numb us to alerts in general when things might really go bad.
FWIW, in round numbers, a mag 5.5 earthquake is 1 kiloton, mag 6.5 is 32 kt, and mag 7.5 is 1000 kt. Every +2 magnitudes is supposed to be a ×1000 difference in energy.
Tornados move and form very fast. Much like a flash flood.
I know for me and my family, when we get a tornado siren we do actually go to our designated safe spot. It's never touched down anywhere near us, but we still do it.
I can't speak to tornado warnings, but here in NZ we've been getting tsunami warnings once every year or two and it didn't take long for people to go "yeah yeah yeah" instead of "oh crap".
In the 1980s I was in Iowa visiting my grandparents when the tornado warnings went off in the middle of the night. I didn't know what they were and it being the 1980s assumed Russia had launched their nukes. I woke everyone up to get to the basement so fast!
Iowa infrastructure was good back in the 1980s. If the sirens went off you knew it's bad, normally because someone actually had to see a tornado on the ground.
The aftermath of an F5 can look like a localized nuke went off.
NIMBY is the most powerful political force in every western country.
It's far easier killing off any new economic and public development at the local level than any national level environmentalist or small government movement could ever dream for.
This is not "NIMBY". Warning systems need to be where they're needed, and if that's your backyard then that's your backyard. Complaining about "damn sirens going off in the middle of the night" during a life and death scenario is on an entirely different level.
> “I’m here to ask this court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House,” one resident told commissioners in April 2022, fearing strings were attached to the money.
> “We don't want to be bought by the federal government, thank you very much,” another resident told commissioners. “We'd like the federal government to stay out of Kerr County and their money.”
Kerr county didn't balk at the cost of flood sirens. Biden sent them 10 million dollars for this exact purpose, and they refused to spend it, because it would have let the federal Democrats do something useful for their constituents. [1]
> "Accepting the ARPA money and putting our County under existing and future executive orders would federalize us and make us all slaves."
These people are certifiably insane.
The 10 million did eventually get spent on new police radios and bonuses for the sheriff's department. [2]
When a state like Texas is so gerrymandered that no political competition is really possible, and ignorance is celebrated, why would be surprised that ignorant people elect stupid people to govern them?
I’m sure that they claim to “back the blue” while refusing to put the communications tools that keep them safe in place as well.
What people of this ilk have done to our nation makes me sick.
The parody comes in when we actually try to talk about and address these issues, and morons proclaim we're using flood victims death's for our political gain.
For many, politics is a team sport. Something so detached and imaginary. When the Giants lose, your house stays intact. They don't realize politics DOES affect their day-to-day lives.
They vote for something for it's consequences, while simultaneously wishing to be exempt from said consequences. It's classic self-destructive behavior.
Kerr county and the state of Texas murdered those people with politics. This is just one of the dangers of rejecting expertise in favor of demagoguery.
They refused to spend the money because it was from Biden (also "climate change"), then refused to return it because it might go to a blue state. First I'm hearing they actually spent it, but not surprised where it ended up
>Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired.
Your classic manager who feels they are so important that hey HAVE TO be involved in X,Y,Z but they are not a responsible enough person to actually do the job.
FEMA has "Emergency" in the name. Traditionally, it's supposed to come in when the normal rescue infrastructure has failed, due to earthquake, weather, etc. You're not optimizing for cost here. You're optimizing for reliable emergency management -- and that's going to cost money.
If you wanted a different agency, like one that prioritized "recovery after 6 months", well, it would help to inform the nation that FEMA is no longer the nationwide emergency management agency. It's up to the local and state governments.
And Texas voters overwhelmingly voted for politicians who caused this and still make excuses for these same politicians. I am tired of caring for people who vote for people that harm them.
I thought that there was a bar somewhere, a line that would not be crossed, but there isn't, it's just straight up identity politics, or owning the libs, whatever you want to call it.
There has always been a place for emergency management. Just ask Kansas about tornados in the 1960s/70s before the rise of doppler radar. And even after in 2007, there was Greensburg, KS.
We can and probably should have arguments about the effective cost of government programs. But Kerr County residents fought hard to not pay $20 per resident (assuming population of 53,000) for a $1M flood warning system. So this is the outcome. And it will cost Kerr County way more than $1M in cleanup.
Please remember to take the statements posters make in the best possible light.
My interpretation of such is that they're sick of voters who expect a double standard. Don't do something ''I'' don't like when it helps other people, but when ''I'' need help godspeed.
The best possible light is that he cares about the lives of the little girls and many others that Trump and Musk and Noem and DOGE killed more than owning the libs and canceling NOAA.
The people deserving of compassion and sympathy are dead. The people who killed them are busy explaining why despite the repeated warnings and tax payer funding, this actually wasn't their fault.
The town that was flooded rejected _free funds_ from the federal government during Covid because they were choking on a red pill of conspiranoia. Destiny (the streamer) did a recent streaming session where he watched the video of the town feedback regarding accepting / rejecting federal government funds from the American Recovery Act (for sirens and standardized first responder comms systems). The short version of the plot is the people were propagandized to distrust the Biden Admin, so they rejected the free upgrades. The voters pressured the town council (one was an actual threat of violence, followed by threats of “consequences”) if the town council accepted the federal funds.
There are consequences to voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.
I don’t blame the little girls, but with freedom comes responsibility. Their parents were responsible for choosing the camp they went to. The camp owner and staff made the risk evaluations of allowing them to sleep in a flood plain during a storm. The local town voted for their representatives and those representatives rejected federal funds which would have given them a chance to survive without cell coverage.
Ultimately your parent comment wasn’t necessarily assigning individual blame. In a democratic republic, the voters / citizens / residents (in aggregate) are ultimately responsible for the actions that elected representatives take in their name.
> voters and representatives who no longer believe in our shared objective reality.
This hits the nail on the head. Before you talk to someone, there's no telling what planet they're going to be on. Maybe you can talk about the weather. Maybe they think the Democrats control the weather with space lasers. There's just no telling.
There is only one thing that might help: making it clear that this is going to keep happening. There are a lot of people who could help, but haven't in the past. If a small fraction of them realize that this is a problem that they can help fix with very little effort, then maybe it might get better.
Having said that, here's the really unhelpful part: I don't think this will work, either. I believe that the overwhelming majority of people vote the same every time, including choosing not to vote. The only thing that changes is a microscopic minority, and they choose randomly. I believe that if we re-ran the 2024 election again right now, the result would be identical.
I point that out only to say the my original comment is me being optimistic. I actually think it's even worse.
Yeah see you’re just putting negativity into the world.
I come here for intellectual curiosity. I want to hear new ideas. You’re not saying anything new. You’re leaving the social media equivalent of dog turds on the sidewalk. Please be a better neighbor.
So exactly what new ideas do you suggest that will make MAGA love minorities, immigrants, non straight people, and stop believing that a magical being in the sky is not going to bring hellfire and damnation down because “the gays are allowed to married”
Bad things are naturally negative. People died, and that sucks and has actively made the world a worse place. We must approach this with truth and realism.
I think the political spectrum is dangerous because people expect the Paradox of Tolerance and similar correlations to silence the left in places where the right will happily speak.
I once worked for a company that had a founder who was cancelling all contracts on a yearly basis, including renting the office. They were proud of cutting costs that way. After two times, the property owner said, "Great! I have a company that asked me about the space and is willing to pay much more" and the company of several hundred people had to move on very short notice.
Yes, it was very rich, but it did disrupt operations a lot and the new space wasn't as nice - we moved from team offices to an open layout, with my boss praising the open layout - we then found out he would get a private office.
I call people like this "octopuses". They need to have their tentacles everywhere, need to be involved in everything, no matter how little they're needed.
> On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
> That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
> The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
That's what's supposed to happen. The Trump administration is shutting down FEMA. Emergency response is now a state responsibility. The interim head of FEMA who told Congress this was a bad move was fired the next day.[1]
Federal disaster relief is now a gift to be given at the whim of the President. Usually, only red states get it. See the list of major disaster declarations here.[2] More details.[3]
It seems to me like a Christian who really thought about it could realize the philosophy of God in advance and then his mysterious ways might require less tragedy.
Phrasing matters. using "didn't" puts a bad light on FEMA but if they used "couldn't" it changes things. no idea which it is but i'd bet it should read "couldn't"
Did they force people to vote for Trump in 2016? Even now close to 50% of people approve of what he is doing. Is it too hard to accept that this is the American voting public and what they care about?
Everyone wants to blame social media. People knew exactly what they were getting from Trump. He had been in office for four years. They wanted Trump and he still has an almost 50% approval rating. Despite what Michelle Obama said, this is who this country has always been.
This was many, many moons ago, but I still vividly remember learning that the vast majority of people who fought in the confederate army didn't own slaves.
It might be a bit of a silly point, but somehow it seems even worse to go to war for other people's slaves.
At what point do people stop making excuses for people? People especially in Texas willingly voted for both a President, Senators and representatives who had all been in office before and they knew exactly who they were - someone who promised to hurt other people, just not people who looked like them. Have the tech companies forced them to vote Republican since the 60s?
The point isn't that I'm making excuses for Texas voters, it's that you're both ignorantly making pathetic excuses for high tech companies, and ignorantly making false statements about Texas voters.
You're wrong that Texas hasn't voted Republican since the 60's: they've voted Republican since Reagan in 1981. And they voted Democrat long before the 60s when they were segregationist, before the Republicans became the racist party with the Southern Strategy.
Is this really a surprise to you because you are you a Russian troll who never learned about US history, or are you just too intellectually lazy to look it up in Wikipedia?
Solid Democratic South: Texas backed Democrats for president through the mid-1960s -- even as the party enforced segregationist policies at home—carrying LBJ with 63.32% in 1964.
1960s Democratic wins: John F. Kennedy won Texas in 1960 (50.52% - 48.52%) and Hubert Humphrey narrowly carried it in 1968 with 41.14%.
Early “swing” elections: Richard Nixon broke through in 1972 (66.20% for Nixon vs. 33.24% for McGovern), but Democrats reclaimed it for Jimmy Carter in 1976 (51.14%).
Reagan realignment: Beginning with Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980, Texas has voted Republican in every presidential contest since.
Statewide Democratic comebacks: Even after that, Texas elected Democrat Mark White governor in 1982 (53% - 46%) and Ann Richards in 1990 (49.5% - 46.9%).
U.S. Senate (Democratic representation)
Ralph Yarborough (D) served from 1957 - 1971, leading the liberal wing of the party in Washington
Lloyd Bentsen (D) won the Class 1 seat in 1970 (took office 1971) and was reelected in 1976, 1982, and 1988 -- he remains the last Democrat Texas voters sent to the Senate in a general election.
Bob Krueger (D) was appointed by Governor Ann Richards in January 1993 to fill Bentsen’s seat; he served until June 1993, when he lost the special election to Kay Bailey Hutchison (R).
Governor’s Mansion & Statewide Offices
Mark White (D) broke the GOP’s hold in 1982, defeating incumbent Bill Clements and serving as governor 1983 - 1987.
Ann Richards (D) won the 1990 gubernatorial race -- she was governor 1991 - 1995 and the last Democrat (and last woman) to hold that office.
Texas Legislature
Senate majority: Democrats held the State Senate until 1996 (75th Legislature); Republicans first took control in 1997.
House majority: Democrats controlled the Texas House through 2002; Republicans gained it in 2003 (78th Legislature).
So in other words, Texas has always been interested in voting for racists? They have always been okay with policies that hurt other people as long as it doesn’t hurt them?
And if tech companies turned Texas Red since the 80s, are you blaming Microsoft and Apple or IBM for it happening back then?
Do you really think if it weren’t for BigTech Red states like Texas would be a liberal utopia?
Yes, because I as Black person who grew up in the south, whose still living parents grew up in the segregated south, who lived in a county that was a “sun down town” as recently as the mid 80s (yes this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0), whose six foot 2 step son got looked at suspiciously every time we walked out our house even though we made twice the median household income in the county know that America has always had a majority of people swayed by dog whistles from Willy Horton, to “Haitians eating pets”, “immigrants bringing crime and disease”, “the gays are trying to force your boys to wear dresses”, “Obama is a secret Muslim and really not an American citizen” etc.
Fox News is a reflection on a large part of America not the cause of it.
I blame big tech, because Thiel, Musk and their alike had put quite a large resources into radicalizing the extreme right as much as possible. I do blame republican voters too ... but only a few of them have put millions into making extreme right normal. And quite a few of those are literally big tech.
The issue with lack of flood preparation was not racism specifically. Nor were the FEMA contracts stopped because of racism. But it was very much MAGA. And it was exactly what big tech was trying to achieve.
The FEMA being destroyed is very much Musk doing. Open positions in NWS were literally open because Musk bought place in government so that he can slash them.
The extreme right has always been radicalized - lynching, segregation, colored only water fountains, etc. Musk wasn’t on the scene in the 80s, 90s, etc. I was called a n%%%% way before Musk came on the scene…
No, I think the companies running vast propaganda campaigns for the sake of their favored candidate so that they can pay 1% less in taxes and/or fuck around with the country as a side project deserve the blame.
They do represent a majority of Americans, but that is different from a majority of voters this time around. I do not belive a majority of Americans like what is going on, and all of us were lied to by those seeking authoritarian rule.
Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. He was in office for four years. Absolutely nothing about him has changed. The only thing is that the people who voted for him thought he was going to hurt other people - not them
> Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do
No he doesn't. He has never provided a straight answer to any question about policy ever. He just said whatever he thought the audience wanted to hear. His answer to the same question has never been the same.
It's just that 50% of americans have been captivated by fox/facebook/twitter, and they tell those americans what to believe, and they're telling to vote trump, nomatter what he says.
Like, common. He was very readable and predictable when it comes to policies we discuss now. Literally no one expected him to make healthcare more affordable, to make life of poor better, to build up emergency response agencies or to be nice to trans.
Literally everyone, his voters and his opposition, expected him to do pretty much what he is doing now. The only difference is that his voter thought only other people will be harmed, not themselves. They were looking forward having fun while libs and democrats and trans and whoever else they hate suffer.
And his audience wanted to hear that he would “own the libs”, male life hard for minorities, immigrants, and non straight people.
You think racism, homohophis snd nationalism started with tech companies and Fox News? Even when Fox tried to tell the truth about the election and poll results, people just go to NewsMax and OANN.
It’s become increasingly clear that at least some of them did not consider the negative impacts of a second Trump term’s policies on their personal lives and are now having to bear the violent results of that awful realization.
The outrage and culture wars are not what the 100k deciding voters across 3 states based their choice on. Half of voters pay zero attention to the news and politics.
It was mainly prices, which historically has been a very common deciding factor. If people feel pain in their pocket book, they will give someone else a shot. They also remembered feeling better financially pre-covid
If you are trying to imply democrats should be nicer to republicans, that was disproven over years.
Conservatives consistently prefer the most offensive insulting person around. And calls on left to make it nicer just move overtone window to the right. Conservatives interpret it as a weaknees.
Plus, it causes forever shift where republicans are euphemismed around, sanewashed and consistentky made to look better. That is failing strategy.
Because your feelings get hurt when the con artist you chose as your champion has his own words and deeds described accurately? And this justifies spitefully wrecking the country by supporting an unhinged autocrat whose motives sit somewhere between manic dementia and serving foreign interests? And still rather than acknowledging this might have been a poor idea, you double down with some idea that it was justified simply to have expressed yourself, even though the first question out of every second Democrat's mouth is how to reconcile and find common ground with Republicans?
Look man, I'm a libertarian. I get the frustration and I totally understood why someone would vote for Trump in 2016. But after seeing his first round of abject failure and wanton dividership and then voting for even more of that, you deserve every ton of criticism heaped on you. This was really the time to put country above partisan squabbling, and you failed horribly.
