Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 153 posts

Re: Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

#91

Post by patrickmclaren »

hannibal5 wrote: post #78
gexla wrote: post #5

Wow, that's an insane death toll. To put this in perspective, last year, another super typhoon, Pablo, killed close to 2000 I believe. The year before that another devastating typhoon, Sendong, killed something like 1200. The Philippines regularly gets hit with 20 typhoons each year and the typhoon season isn't over. Each of the above mentioned typhoons hit in December. This has to be among the deadliest in Philippin…

To put things into context. 1.3 million people die and 50 million people are injured in car accidents every year. Nature disasters are just side show in human life at this point.

This does not put things into context at all. You do realize that this is a single event, localized in a single region of the world, right?

This is equivalent the population to small neighborhood all dying at once. In addition to destruction caused.

Regardless of the cause, large amounts of loss of human life in a single event are still considered significant. The reverberating effects throughout the neighboring communities are perhaps most noticeable. You are removing an entire node from a graph, rather than individual leaves.

Re: Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

#92

Post by dtl352 »

rdl wrote: post #82
larrys wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it would be a great humanitarian thing, plus a show of strength for one of our key Pacific allies" Are you suggesting that there is excess money for something like this in the Navy budget? There are an unlimited number of things that we could do to make the world better and we can't do all of them. Like in business you have to undertake a cost/benefit analysis and see if it makes sense then to do or not. Not to ment…

We do stupid exercises all the time which use more money than altering a patrol to go to the region and offloading water/food/fuel. The funding could be moved from usaid as well. In general we should basically do anything do anything less than billions to win over Vietnam, PI, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and show our alliance with SK, Japan, and Taiwan, and build friendship with China. A billion invested in that p…

That's an Americentric viewpoint. There's no need to "win over" anybody. If the US wants to regain trust and increase soft power, it should be helping based on genuine altruism and mutual respect, not for underlying political motives.

Re: Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

#93

Post by hannibal5 »

nzealand wrote: post #90
hannibal5 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put things into context. 1.3 million people die and 50 million people are injured in car accidents every year. Nature disasters are just side show in human life at this point.

It sounds like their entire community and economy is devastated. If disaster taps on your neighborhood window, I suspect you would sing a different tune.

Precisely my point. This is localized catastrophe. For us, it has less effect than car accident happening to our neighbor.

Because the people who died were poor, this accident adds net positive emotional entertainment value to the life of typical consumer.

Re: Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

#94

Post by TylerE »

mistermann wrote: post #83
TylerE wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you can open source a few billion cubic meters of concrete it would have done fuck all.

Assuming concrete is the only solution to the problem.

When the problem is essentially damming a 100-mile wide river, yea, it's pretty much the only solution. Again, the damage here was the tsunami-scale storm surge, not so much the wind.

Re: Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

#96

Post by gexla »

hannibal5 wrote: post #78
gexla wrote: post #5

Wow, that's an insane death toll. To put this in perspective, last year, another super typhoon, Pablo, killed close to 2000 I believe. The year before that another devastating typhoon, Sendong, killed something like 1200. The Philippines regularly gets hit with 20 typhoons each year and the typhoon season isn't over. Each of the above mentioned typhoons hit in December. This has to be among the deadliest in Philippin…

To put things into context. 1.3 million people die and 50 million people are injured in car accidents every year. Nature disasters are just side show in human life at this point.

Sure, death happens in large numbers every day. Why mourn these 10,000 deaths any more than any other deaths from around the world? We probably shouldn't. Because death is natural and unavoidable, it isn't necessarily tragic by itself.

Your community, your system, is able to absorb the deaths which happen within that community. People in your community die from old age, traffic accidents, disease and many other ways, but the wheels of the system keep spinning. In the case of the Philippines, the recent tsunamis and other large scale natural disasters, entire communities were obliterated. These systems have completely broken down. In Leyte, 10,000 people died, but the system which supported tens of thousands more living is broken.

The local economy for many of these people has been pushed back to the stone ages. The rich still have their bank accounts intact. They can jump on a plane and start over somewhere else. The poor don't have this option. There is no functioning system there to support the people who have to stay there. They have nothing to eat, no money for medicine, nowhere to live and they are completely dependent on a government with relatively little resources. Restoring this system will take months if not years. Many people will never fully recover. Future generations will get held back from what they could have been. There's not much of a safety net here.

ETA: And sure, the ripples of this shock won't go much further than the borders of the Philippines. But I think Fukishima might be a good counter to your "natural disasters as a side show" argument. We don't yet know how much this disaster will affect us. It could do serious long term damage to the ecosystem of the Pacific ocean. Could the world see mass cancer from eating fish in the Pacific ocean?

Re: Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

#97

Post by AaronIG »

rdl wrote: post #2

I still don't get why the US Navy hasn't put an LHD or equivalent amphibious group into the relief effort -- it would be a great humanitarian thing, plus a show of strength for one of our key Pacific allies after the "pivot to Asia" -- a pretty clear implication that if we can put a battalion ashore to help hours after a hurricane, we can do similar things during a conflict. Extra points due to the huge number of USN…

They've deployed ships.

I took part in the 2008 humanitarian relief det when Typhoon Fengshen hit land, and our response time was about seven hours from the time we got the phone call and had planes and helos on the ground delivering supplies and providing medical care.

Those response times are largely based on how quickly we can get supplies from USAID, and receive an actual request for assistance.

Re: Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

#99

Post by mpyne »

hannibal5 wrote: post #78
gexla wrote: post #5

Wow, that's an insane death toll. To put this in perspective, last year, another super typhoon, Pablo, killed close to 2000 I believe. The year before that another devastating typhoon, Sendong, killed something like 1200. The Philippines regularly gets hit with 20 typhoons each year and the typhoon season isn't over. Each of the above mentioned typhoons hit in December. This has to be among the deadliest in Philippin…

To put things into context. 1.3 million people die and 50 million people are injured in car accidents every year. Nature disasters are just side show in human life at this point.

That's not a very helpful context. Lots of people die every year from relatively low-risk activities they choose to participate in, and those deaths don't typically involve the destruction of the entire community support structure in the process.

In other words, the deaths in the Philippines are bad enough, but there are millions of people still alive and put into great distress as we speak. And it's not as if it's their fault (which was the argument brought up for Katrina as well...), it's not as if they can be safe if they move to Japan (as if there were either the funding or political will for that).

Re: Typhoon Haiyan kills 10,000 in Philippines

#100

Post by mpyne »

dtl352 wrote: post #92
rdl wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do stupid exercises all the time which use more money than altering a patrol to go to the region and offloading water/food/fuel. The funding could be moved from usaid as well. In general we should basically do anything do anything less than billions to win over Vietnam, PI, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and show our alliance with SK, Japan, and Taiwan, and build friendship with China. A billion invested in that p…

That's an Americentric viewpoint. There's no need to "win over" anybody. If the US wants to regain trust and increase soft power, it should be helping based on genuine altruism and mutual respect, not for underlying political motives.

Don't be silly, even "genuine altruism" is still at best self-serving in the end.

"I do this good thing for you because it makes me feel better about my contribution to the world".

Likewise when the U.S. engaged in the Marshall Plan way back when, there were very obvious ulterior motives for the U.S. (a bulwark against Communist spread, expansion of the U.S. economy to supply our Western European allies, etc.), but that didn't invalidate the actual physical assistance rendered either.

Post reply on HN