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Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

nytimes.com

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Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#211

Post by mmanfrin »

danans wrote: post #137
mmanfrin wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the $3.5B approved for BART to upgrade some lights and wash more of the urine smell off the seats.

This is (intentionally?) false and misleading. $3.2B of that is going to replacing the system's electrical infrastructure, replacing 90 miles of track infrastructure, and on retrofitting all of the tunnels, including the Transbay tube, new train control systems, relieving crowding, and more. [1][2] BART has problems, but it's not spending 3.5B on lights and cleaning seats, and to suggest otherwise, especially without…

I was being hyperbolic, and the bit about washing the smell of urine off the seats should have been a real loud indication of that.

My point was to highlight that we've allocated them $3.5billion for repairs, essentially; we're getting no new track from that bond (where the comments I was responding to were talking about wholesale new constructions).

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#212

Post by corey_moncure »

matt4077 wrote: post #132
corey_moncure wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, the only possible way to stop the coming disaster is for the entire world to come together, collectively, and limit population with sterilization lottery programs. We need to bring things down to 1 billion or less people. Nations that don't volunteer willingly will have to be drug along by force. This probably won't happen, though. We're f#@^ed.

Every single country that has become wealthy has seen a drop in reproduction rates to rates lower than what's necessary to keep population numbers steady–except the US because somehow they managed to be become more religious with time. Meaning you can make excellent progress towards your goal without committing injustices on an industrial scale. Instead, you get to work on empowering women and bringing education, eco…

Education, social justice, economic opportunity and universal health care are all wonderful things but this is a problem we need to solve -now-. We have something like 100 years by conservative estimates before runaway effects like methane clathrate melt and ocean acidification make warming inevitable and irreversible. Even now, in the "wealthy" USA, abandoning coal power is being described as unrealistic, let alone implementing the sweeping social changes you've mentioned in places like Africa, Central America and China.

"Injustices on an industrial scale"? When billions of people are displaced from the rising coasts, when entire nations disappear into the ocean, when our over-homogenized agriculture fails to sudden environmental shifts leading to widespread famine, we'll wish we had just gotten vasectomies instead.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#213

Post by dghughes »

KGIII wrote: post #85
dghughes wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that indicates the project was not planned well since change requests for such a large project would have been expected.

You can only plan on so much. Notably: I only modeled traffic. I am not to blame. ;-) (I have used that caveat so many times.)

Maybe so, but I'm referring to the actual project management process group called Planning I don't mean plan in general but the actual official and formal steps of Planning.

Then the Monitoring and Control process group will evaluate Planning again each time it loops back, so it makes no sense to me their plan failed, multiple times really for each loop. It's even worse knowing that each time they come back to Planning as part of the process they screwed up yet again.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#214

Post by yongjik »

vkou wrote: post #145
KGIII wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the things I could write... Let's do just that, shall we? Warning, this could take a minute. The Big Dig was pretty much my first project outside of the lab. I am not overly fond of admitting to my part in the project but it could be worse, much worse. Truth be told, we did our job just fine, but I digress. By the time I got involved with the project, it had been in planning stage for quite a while and had underg…

> There is tons of waste in government, I think we know that. But, politicians will add more - so long as it gets them votes. Interestingly, in this case, the guy campaigned on prosperity for the local economy. The project must not disrupt local business. Got to make money, after all. Yet, it slowed the project down and probably added a good 10% to the overall budget. The lengths we went to were absurd. Contrast that…

That's interesting. What did they do so wrong to drive everyone out of business?

In Seoul I grew up watching subway construction all the time. Yes the local traffic suffers for many years, but the underground construction is covered with iron roofs that allow overground traffic, and people get used to it. After all, a street is likely to have subway construction because it had a large number of people using it: these people don't suddenly go away. (If they did, it would be a major blunder on the part of subway planners!)

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#215

Post by vkou »

yongjik wrote: post #214
vkou wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is tons of waste in government, I think we know that. But, politicians will add more - so long as it gets them votes. Interestingly, in this case, the guy campaigned on prosperity for the local economy. The project must not disrupt local business. Got to make money, after all. Yet, it slowed the project down and probably added a good 10% to the overall budget. The lengths we went to were absurd. Contrast that…

That's interesting. What did they do so wrong to drive everyone out of business? In Seoul I grew up watching subway construction all the time. Yes the local traffic suffers for many years, but the underground construction is covered with iron roofs that allow overground traffic, and people get used to it. After all, a street is likely to have subway construction because it had a large number of people using it: these…

> That's interesting. What did they do so wrong to drive everyone out of business?

The whole street looked like a large bomb crater for a year.

Yes, you could still access the buildings, but why on earth would you shop on Cambie, when you could go the next block over to Robson. Even a 10% reduction in customers could sink many retail businesses, over such a period of time.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#216

Post by nostrademons »

shoo wrote: post #173
jacobolus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. > “I think that if we keep things up long enough, we’ll get to a mass extinction, but we’re not in a mass extinction yet, and I think that’s an optimistic discovery because that means we actually have time to avoid Armageddon,” he said. [...] > “The only hope we have in the future,” Erwin said, “is if we’re not in a mass extinction event.” * * * I guess it’s a bit fuzzy where you draw the line. Perhaps mass ext…

It's maybe worth drawing a distinction between things like "species extinction" versus "civilization collapse" and "massive reduction in carrying capacity". I think it is much easier to have one or both of the latter outcomes in the med term (the next few hundred years, say) without it necessarily ending in human extinction.

Yeah. There's a whole hierarchy from "inconvenient weather" to "natural disasters" to "cities wiped off the map" to "civilization collapse" to "all civilization collapses" to "we're back in the stone age" to "humanity goes extinct" to "vertebrates go extinct" to "almost everything goes extinct" to "earth can no longer support life as we know it". Each level is a couple orders of magnitude more severe than the last, and each level is a couple orders of magnitude less likely.

The first is already happening. The second is highly likely. #3 and 4 are possible, but beginning to strain the bounds of likelihood. Somehow whenever global warming comes up people tend to jump to the last level, ignoring all the other steps and the massive reduction in complexity that has to happen without adaptation from any other lifeform for us to get there.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#217

Post by averagewall »

ergothus wrote: post #208
averagewall wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloodletting. It's honestly trivial to find examples of where science was wrong. I'm not going to research them for you if you'll make up ad-hoc reasons to reject them. Obviously I can't give an example of current consensus being likely wrong because if I knew that, scientists would too and it wouldn't be the consensus. Here's a snarky example though. See if you can find the flaw in it - current consensus among scien…

Cannot prove causation is not the same as cannot conclude causation. As you point out with your medical example, we have plenty of cases where we act with evidence but not proof. Sometimes these are wrong...but more often they are not (when talking about science). Often there is some evidence in both directions (for/against a theory), so we likewise have experience and examples where we must decide based on that impe…

My problem here isn't that I think the concerns aren't valid, but that whenever the topic comes up, multiple people start to push the agenda of "we must all take action now", as if they're trying to drum up an army of supporters, which they probably are. It gets embedded in just about any climate change related discussion, news article and even science paper.

You can't even disagree with anything related to the topic without people jumping to the conclusion that you're a climate change denier and insisting on educating you. It shuts down genuine discussion. Even evolutionist arguing creationists have managed to admit that it's just a theory, but then go on to show how strong theories can be which is perfectly righ. Climate change hasn't got to that level of honesty - people are afraid to say it's just a theory because of their agenda.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#218

Post by throwaway5752 »

ergothus wrote: post #209
Banthum wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This figure gets trotted out all the time and it's tiresome because it is so unconvincing to anyone who is even a bit sceptical. That's a bit like asking what percentage of Christian priests believe God exists. There's kind of a selection bias there. More helpful are broader surveys including earth scientists, geologists, etc, which (as I recall, not having the source handy) come up much more conflicted, close to 50%…

> More helpful are broader surveys including earth scientists, geologists, etc, Wait...while i agree that the methodology that gives 97% suffers a selection bias, I don't agree with the above. I would not trust a survey of priests about the existance of God, but I'd prefer their thoughts on the existance of a particular book of the bible than a survey of choir members. Science is huge and detailed. I'd not trust geol…

His figure is probably based on a study specifically addressed in link I provided. Look for "Bray and von Storch (2007) and Bray (2010)" and the critique of their results and methodologies.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#219

Post by late2part »

ergothus wrote: post #207
late2part wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats. You poked a hole in the meta-consensus, proving the point. You ignore the others, that dogma leads to shallow thinking. All the world is the blend of chaos and order; acceptance and rejection, yin and yang. Your contribution helps drive the analytical consideration of acceptance or rejection.

I accept that dogma can allow wrong thoughts to persist, to drive criticism underground. I accept that prevailing scientific/expert opinions can also be right. I accept that the claim of climate change, if true, would have disastrous consequences on a huge number of human lives, and of course business. I also accept that I'm not seeing people studying this field denying human caused climate change. I am not seeing co…

"But you're claiming that a global conspiracy on a literally unprecedented scale is happening"

No I'm not actually. What I'm saying is what I said. It was in reference to the ancestral post asserting that arbitrary confidence was being applied to certain statements.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#220

Post by ergothus »

averagewall wrote: post #217
ergothus wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannot prove causation is not the same as cannot conclude causation. As you point out with your medical example, we have plenty of cases where we act with evidence but not proof. Sometimes these are wrong...but more often they are not (when talking about science). Often there is some evidence in both directions (for/against a theory), so we likewise have experience and examples where we must decide based on that impe…

My problem here isn't that I think the concerns aren't valid, but that whenever the topic comes up, multiple people start to push the agenda of "we must all take action now", as if they're trying to drum up an army of supporters, which they probably are. It gets embedded in just about any climate change related discussion, news article and even science paper. You can't even disagree with anything related to the topic…

I can sympathize with your position - a lot of good discussion can't happen on various topics because you have to defend against the ridiculous.

Re: GMOs - you want to discuss the impact on monocultures, chemical levels and environment impacts (good or ill), prions or other corners of proteins we don't understand, patented genes, wild release of genes (including the patented ones), the economic value in talking cost vs improved yield, or even a serious discussion about what level of labeling (if any) is reasonable? Too bad, you're going to have to deal with people that think GMO food will mutate THEM if eaten.

climate, gun control, vaccines, free speech, etc - you can't have a nuanced, serious discussion to explore details because you have to fight off the fringe(s).

OTOH, however, a higher-than-linear curve of greenhouse gas emissions and year after year, into decade after decade of inaction, has an impact. The 2 degree threshold isn't a firm line...but it's also not arbitrary. If we need to make drastic change, but we've frittered away the decades that COULD have made that more gradual, then yeah, importance of action is higher. I'm not saying we have all stop driving tomorrow...but our current pace is not what we need, so the pressure is up. If we weren't taking as many steps backwards as we are taking forward, if the models said we were closer to a target than the projection said 10 years ago, that'd allow some reduction in the pressure. Instead of saying "we just need to keep our eye on the ball" we have to say "LOOK! THERE'S A FRICKING BALL!".

So I can understand the sense of urgency. Like race relations or gender issues in tech, any complaint that people are overreacting, or that this isn't the time, or this isn't the place has to come with some believable explanation of how they see a better way that hasn't been tried and failed.

To your concluding point: Climate change is a theory. I'll admit that. It could be wrong. The overwhelming majority of those in the world with relevant data and experience can be wrong. Really. But I don't see much evidence that that is more likely than the theory being mostly correct.

With that admission, where are we? Well, we've agreed to something that was already not in question. But for most it's NOT an agreement. We have to somehow convince people that their gut instinct is not a value that should even be considered when deciding things. And again, and again.

When exactly will we STOP agreeing that it's a theory and move on to what to do with it? Will another 10 years be enough? 20?

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