421–430 of 1001 posts
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How about the cost of your life ? If the house resists the earthquake and you are inside it, you don't die.
Building to protect occupants and building to make the structure salvageable afterwards may be two different goals. Think crumple zones in cars.
Cars being on the move, makes that distinction much much more relevant
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To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Perhaps what should be more commonly accepted is that the US is a land of great natural beauty! And large tracts of it should be left to nature. What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400? Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's…
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials. Japan comes to mind as a country that's solved this. > Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case. Relevant: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-01-10/as-flame...
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Pole drift.
Magnetic, rotational, geodetic .. ? What are you trying to say?
Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysmic_pole_shift_hypothe...
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A significant portion of human structures are located close to the coast (seaborne trade having been a huge enabler of economic development for a few hundred years) and are exposed to flooding from rising sea levels, or built in valleys that are increasingly at risk from flooding due to far-above-long-term-historic-norms precipitation runoff (higher atmospheric temps lead to more energy in weather systems; see eg mas…
Compared to the other challenges climate change poses those are fairly simple engineering problems. The Netherlands manage fine with large parts of the country below sea level.
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> most of the time, they're optimistic. Evidence? Has anyone collated predictions over time and compared them with outcomes to date? I can remember a number of specific predictions (e.g. that snow would be unknown in most of the UK by the early 2000s) that were pessimistic. Of course, I recall those because they got a lot of media attention at the time and the media reporting is biased to the most extreme predictions…
HN just had a "Whoops we undercounted plant C02 absorption by 40% for the last 40 years" post so I would say the errors mostly go in one direction.
Surely if plants are absorbing more CO2 than we thought, that's a good thing for climate change? (More CO2 absorbed by plants -> less CO2 staying in the atmosphere -> less warming. No?)
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I've been trying to talk to people locally, a place with lots of homes built in the woodland-urban interface, about the risks of climate change and how insurance will have to change. Unfortunately these discussions almost never go well, because it seems that most people have at best a surface level understanding of what insurance is and how it works, and everyone is convinced that it's a full scam and insurance compa…
> Unfortunately these discussions almost never go well, because it seems that most people have at best a surface level understanding of what insurance is and how it works, and everyone is convinced that it's a full scam and insurance companies are fabricating everything I have the exact same experience when discussing anything insurance related: People have wild assumptions about how much profit insurance companies a…
When you consider that single digit percentages of trillions of dollars is still an obscene amount of money it makes sense. People making tens of billions by applying formulas to spreadsheets and shuffling other people’s money around doesn’t sit right with most people.
Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher. It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly. The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement. I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his…
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In 1666 London had a bit of a problem with fire, after that some building codes were introduced. Buildings made entirely from wood were not allowed and roofs had to have a parapet. If you don't know what a parapet is, take a look up to the roofs on London's older buildings, the front wall rises up past the bottom of the roof. If there is a fire in the building then the parapet keeps the burning roof inside the footpr…
> ideally nobody has living memory of the last [...] Funny, I would have said the exact opposite. If people forget how bad things were, they seem more likely to repeat them. Nazism, for one. And the rise in antivax sentiment - people today have never come across an iron lung, which is a testament to medical technology, but it means some silly opinions get way more traction than they should. "Those who cannot remember…
> "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana
I have expressed that idea with different attribution before now, but, on reflection, it is a 'trite quote' that can be trotted out far too easily!