201–210 of 230 posts
>Global sea levels are currently rising at an accelerating rate, measuring roughly 3.6–4.6 mm per year
so in say 30 years time at the higher figure you have 30*4.6mm = 13.8 cm
The sea is broadly at sea level so it's going to be a job to get the "3-7 metres of sea-level rise"?
My roots are in Louisiana, and this makes me incredibly sad. It is such a unique place that has no like, and drives all tourism in the state. Where will tourists celebrate Mardi Gras after it's gone? Baton Rouge? Sadder, still, to know that nothing will be done. No one will be relocated. Just one day a weather event like a hurricane will happen to destroy the area and it will be labeled derelict with no funds to rebu…
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> it's an emotional obsession with small percentages of the population Ah, right: it's a small percentage of the population, so we should just let them die, "and decrease the surplus population", right? This kind of callousness is one of the biggest problem with the tech industry today. We learned to think in numbers, and some of us never learned to think about the people behind those numbers. Yes, there are some kin…
> The people who can move now, without financial hardship, get to make their own choices about when and whether to get out. The people we, as a society, should be thinking about are the people who cannot get out—either without financial ruination, or at all—because they are the ones we as a society must help. This is exactly the problematic thinking I’m talking about. Your obsession with using society to help those w…
Even for reasonably-stable middle-class people, moving—especially out of a place like NOLA—is going to cause financial hardship.
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> The last person can currently only get the money if a disaster strikes and insurance pays out. Usually there is no insurance. The insurance industry, for all of its other faults, is one of the few left that still deals in reality instead of vibes so they aren't going to give you affordable insurance against floods/hurricanes/etc in these areas with any real coverage.
They aren't going to give you affordable insurance even in places that don't generally get hit by floods/hurricanes/etc. I have a house in Louisiana (up "north") - outside of a couple tornados every few years, and the heavy rains of a hurricane every few years, it is a fairly "safe" place. Never been a claim against the property, or any immediate neighbors. We aren't in a floodplain of any sort, and are on top of a h…
I am not sure about Louisiana, but you very well may be.
State insurance commissions sometimes promulgate onerous regulations that effectively require cost shifting. For example, if it's profitable to keep operating in a state overall, but you can't raise premiums or drop policies for the riskiest properties, then you just raise premiums across the board and let the less-risky subsidize the unprofitable policies.
And rising reinsurance premiums mean that everybody pays more to account for increasing risks and costs in the insurers' portfolios, which may be concentrated in riskier areas far from your own property.
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Also why just flood risk? Is it unethical for me to sell my Condo which is in “up and coming area” which never upped and never came and has a very high crime rate (with/without disclaimer)? My friend lives in another area where schools are as bad as it gets, she is looking to move now, unethical to sell that too (with/without disclaimer)?
Is it unethical to lie in order to sell something? Yes, yes it is. This sort of puffery is relatively minor and is thus not tremendously unethical, but it is unethical.
what exactly is a lie in this context specifically I wonder?
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> The people who can move now, without financial hardship, get to make their own choices about when and whether to get out. The people we, as a society, should be thinking about are the people who cannot get out—either without financial ruination, or at all—because they are the ones we as a society must help. This is exactly the problematic thinking I’m talking about. Your obsession with using society to help those w…
I assure you, the proportion of New Orleans residents who would be able to leave now without financial hardship are not the majority. Even for reasonably-stable middle-class people, moving—especially out of a place like NOLA—is going to cause financial hardship.
There will need to be a federal bailout to relocate everyone who needs help. The government should also probably announce a policy that there will be no future disaster relief that involves rebuilding, only relocating.
New Orleans will be the first, but not the last American city to collapse. Miami is probably next. Salt Lake City could very well run out of water, nevermind the increasingly toxic lakebed. Phoenix too. In the next hundred years people are going to learn why environmentalists use the word "sustainability" so much.
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> The people who can move now, without financial hardship, get to make their own choices about when and whether to get out. The people we, as a society, should be thinking about are the people who cannot get out—either without financial ruination, or at all—because they are the ones we as a society must help. This is exactly the problematic thinking I’m talking about. Your obsession with using society to help those w…
I assure you, the proportion of New Orleans residents who would be able to leave now without financial hardship are not the majority. Even for reasonably-stable middle-class people, moving—especially out of a place like NOLA—is going to cause financial hardship.
In any given year, 15% of the population moves, and 40% of them move to a different county. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/why-people-mo.... It's insane to say that most people wouldn't be able to make a once-in-a-lifetime move just a couple of towns over sometime over the next few decades.
Miami too. The city is build on porous limestone. No amount of levees, seawalls, or dams will save it.
Put dikes around it, make channels to collect the seepage, pump water out of channels over the dikes into the sea. Problem solved in the same way the Netherlands has been solving this problem for many centuries. The pumps can run on solar power with some diesel backups for when the sun doesn't co-operate. As long as the system is kept in good shape and the channels are kept open Miami can lie several meters under sea…
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Is it unethical to lie in order to sell something? Yes, yes it is. This sort of puffery is relatively minor and is thus not tremendously unethical, but it is unethical.
> Is it unethical to lie in order to sell something? what exactly is a lie in this context specifically I wonder?