41–50 of 128 posts
The only real problem is that this was a decision made ad hoc. People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should know years in advance that they are designated for it.
I had a friend in Houston who knew well in advance that his street was in the splash zone, so to speak. He got out way before it became bad but his building was later completely destroyed (he was a renter so it couldve been much worse.
> total damages claimed could reach $10 billion or more, especially if the big energy and oil companies—whose presence in one section of West Houston gave it the nickname the Energy Corridor—sue over their flooded headquarters. the irony that the home neighborhood of many of the worlds largest oil companies would want to sue because the global warming they're at the core of causing contributed towards the damage of t…
Crazy. All those oil companies forcing you to buy stuff that gets transported by trucks that use oil. You’re blaming the drug dealers for people choosing to shoot heroin. Feel free to stop consuming oil. Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil and uses power generated using oil. If you buy a single thing made in China, you are buying products generally made using coal-fired electricity. Unless you live in a grass…
> Even your Tesla has plastics made from oil
I think nearly all plastics are made out of natural gas, not oil.
People are cheering at this, but what if we raise the stakes a little: The government lined up 50 random people and executed them, to appease a foreign government that was holding 500x people captive. We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? Scape goat. Since it is property, the engineers probably assumed they'd be sued, and I bet they knew exactly what they were doing,…
What makes you think that any kind of property is worth as much as a human life?
The only real problem is that this was a decision made ad hoc. People whose neighborhoods are likely to be flooded by such a decision should know years in advance that they are designated for it.
I find this article beautifully ironic. Climate change denying executives have homes and offices flooded by climate changed storm water.
I definitely had a smile on my face this entire article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Houston was been flooded several times before. Particularly in 1929 and 1935 when the county finally decided to form a flood control agency. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris_County_Flood_Control_... Climate change is real, but if every time we get bad weather you call it that it’s a little like crying wolf.
Except the argument isn't about the frequency of storms nor the occurrence of a severe storm, but the increase in frequency of severe storms. Essentially, if we put more energy into the system, then we shouldn't be surprised if more energy is outputted as a result of the same system. > A sustained upward trend is found between the global proportion of Cat 4–5 hurricanes and ACCI (Fig. 4), balanced by a similar decrea…
Your comment is already grey, I just wanted you to know why.
EDIT: Could I not get downvoted for stating a fact. That'd be great. I guess it was actually only 11 years and 10 months, is that the problem here?
People are cheering at this, but what if we raise the stakes a little: The government lined up 50 random people and executed them, to appease a foreign government that was holding 500x people captive. We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? Scape goat. Since it is property, the engineers probably assumed they'd be sued, and I bet they knew exactly what they were doing,…
You could say it serves them right (rich people) for building in a flood plain - it's normally the newer less nice areas that get flooded in the UK - as in the past they where considered to risky
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? If we'd be talking paperclips vs paperclips would that be morally similar? Or is the monetary value of houses somehow large enough to justify a similarity to human lives?
Lets say you lose 10000 dollars worth of paper clips. Big deal, buy more. But if you lose 10000 dollars worth of photos, computers, files, etc, it is a big deal because they are harder to replace.
Even so, none of those things matter (photos, computer files, etc) when you balance them with a human life.
People are cheering at this, but what if we raise the stakes a little: The government lined up 50 random people and executed them, to appease a foreign government that was holding 500x people captive. We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? Scape goat. Since it is property, the engineers probably assumed they'd be sued, and I bet they knew exactly what they were doing,…
I feel that the central thesis of your comment that the government is this faceless entity that has decided through force to violate lives and is thereby reprehensible to be something that's counter to the facts of the matter and the case at hand.
From the article, it quickly becomes clear that they were trying to avoid catastrophic failure by diverting water to a historic food plain;
> “If we don’t begin releasing now, the volume of uncontrolled water around the dams will be higher,” Colonel Lars Zetterstrom, the Corps’ Galveston district commander, was quoted as saying. “It’s going to be better to release the water through the gates directly into Buffalo Bayou.” The danger was that the water would flow uncontrolled into homes located upstream from the reservoir, crest the reservoir walls downstream, or crack a section of the Barker dam that was under repair. Had either dam failed, the Houston Chronicle later wrote, West Houston would have been left with “a week of corpses by the mile.”
In one cases, the failure would have been sudden and would have killed an unforeseeably large number of people. In another, they could act to preserve lives, but damage property that can be later rebuilt. They chose the latter, and I believe this was the most moral and correct response to the situation at hand.
Why aren't these people heroes for making this call? The Government in this case acted exactly as it should; as an entity that is meant to be representative of and beholden to its citizens and chose an action that preserved the lives of citizens over arbitrary property value that can be repaid through other means.
There is no version of this scenario that plays out well for anyone at all, but the fact that they minimized harm while reducing the risk of catastrophic failure shows that the system does work as intended. After all, homes can be rebuilt, but as far as I can tell, people can't be brought back from the dead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are harder to replace than houses.
There are more people born each day (400,000 a day) than there are houses built each day (4,657 a day). So I'd say no, houses are harder to replace than people.