Jammies "Born of Anxiety" would be a good alternative album.
Point 1 is a good one - yes, I definitely expect that the US will be a great deal better at handling mass destruction by 2027 than now. Experience is a good teacher and FEMA will basically be on a war footing from now on; I'd expect lots more investment in disaster relief technology. Not under the current government, obvs, but from 2020 on.
Assuming at least they don't fuck up Irma, this is already delivered - Trump hasn't managed to ruin the FEMA capability built up after getting rid of Heckuva Brownie. The tombstone model of safety improvement in action.
AIHumbleBraggedB, my adoptive city is almost entirely ringed by formidable mountains, meaning Roc Island can save 1/3 of population and GDP from the sea with a wall literally 2km long. And if that doesn't pan out my home city is almost literally 2km above sea level.
The entrance to Baltimore's inner harbor is narrow enough that some sort of retractable sea wall to keep the storm surge from flooding Fells Point and downtown should be very doable. But I suspect we're too disfunctional to do it until some sort of catastrophic flooding occurs. Probably not even then.
Meanwhile, whoever is aboard this aeroplane isn't being paid enough.
https://www.tropicaltidbits.com/recon/
(Website that summarises NOAA and USAF weather recce flights into hurricanes.)
Assuming at least they don't fuck up Irma, this is already delivered
Sort of. But I'm pretty sure that by 2027, we'll have recognized a lot of things we'd do differently for Harvey.
I'm picturing the shock of losing all your possessions as becoming a cultural norm that so many people have gone through that it's become a touchstone and there are mainstream ways of rebuilding that are incidental to popular discourse. Things like public school curriculums with established ways of incorporating things kids should know, or an incidental plot point to a movie instead of the story line, the way sexual assault or identity theft show up now. Will we be having a debate about having a public option for climate insurance?
We sort of do have a public option for climate insurance if you count the flood insurance program. I expect we'll have a debate on that shortly.
Just like with health insurance, on the whole it subsidizes people who tend to be wealthier than the people who aren't eligible.
8.2: see Bruce Sterling, "Heavy Weather" (about tornadoes rather than hurricanes).
"Things like public school curriculums with established ways of incorporating things kids should know, or an incidental plot point to a movie instead of the story line, the way sexual assault or identity theft show up now. Will we be having a debate about having a public option for climate insurance?"
Or any such systems are all outsourced/privatised, and the system staggers on, with the better off abandoning affected areas leaving cities that look like Detroit behind.
After all, how do the numbers of people affected by hurricanes measure up against the number of people affected by critical illness each year? So if there is no political will to solve the latter problem ...
I bet in a fair fight, most people affected by a hurricane would be able to beat up somebody with a critical illness.
Having entire cities, or large parts of them, is pretty common throughout history. Just about any city that's been a large city for at least a few hundred years has been destroyed, to some degree, by war or fire. That it wouldn't seem so is probably the American bias created by being a young, isolated country.
"I'm just like my country: young, scrappy and hungry."
Huh. It turns out there's already a Japanese company that specializes in making retractable sea walls, so we wouldn't even have to design one ourselves!
Funny, I would have thought that a company specializing in sea walls would be Dutch.
Funny, I would have thought that a company specializing in sea walls would be Dutch.
I don't think tsunamis are that frequent in the North Sea.
I don't know. It's surprisingly easy to remain personally isolated from huge horrible trends. For example, I've been living in Ohio for nearly 30 years, and still no one has even offered me heroin or fentanyl.
Just about any city that's been a large city for at least a few hundred years has been destroyed, to some degree, by war or fire.
Not sure that's true, to be honest. Edinburgh? Glasgow? Amsterdam? Geneva? Zurich? Paris was heavily overhauled by Hausmann, but I'm not aware of it ever being even partly destroyed...
Thing is, if you had your shit together climate change would probably be a huge net relative advantage for the US. The bulk of China's economy lives on reclaimed mudflats in Jiangnan and the Pearl Delta. India, Vietnam, Egypt, Thailand, all similar. The US has much smaller problems relative to its size.
21: AFAIK almost every pre-modern city burned down repeatedly, in whole or in part. Mostly accidental rather than war, I think. Even the US had 2 major cities burn to the ground by accident.
Was Chicago really "major" at the time?
Certainly, I think you can count San Francisco as having been "destroyed" once.
Well, England didn't have a winter last year
Wait, Paris had the Commune, of course. Stupid of me.
Since weather isn't climate, this is off topic, but I'm really just delighted that we're having a long stretch where the temperature mostly stays below 70 degrees regular. I don't really like weather above 60, but I'm willing to be flexible.
21: Edinburgh had a Great Fire in 1824, although only 400 homes were destroyed. Probably more substantial was the destruction during the Rough Wooing.
Glasgow as a big city doesn't much predate industrialization. There was the Clydebank Blitz, which I guess isn't the core of the city but left tens of thousands homeless.
Amsterdam's coat of arms literally is about how much is has been fucked up: "The three crosses are thought to suggest the three plagues which have affected the city: flood, fire, and pestilence." Does having 10% of your population die in a plague count as the city being destroyed? That seems more destructive than Harvey. Wikipedia also says that in the fire of 1452 three fourths of the city was destroyed.
I can't imagine that the Swiss cities came out of the wars after the Reformation unharmed.
Yeah, I guess Paris is relatively unusual in its non-destruction.
Omaha has never been destroyed. As I'm sure everyone remembers, a tornado hit it very hard back in the 70s. But Wikipedia says it only damaged 4,000 buildings. A very big chunk of Grand Island was smashed back in 1980. Bad enough for a made-for-TV movie script. But that's not nearly as world city like Omaha.
Also, shantytowns, where I think most people live today, burn down all the time. It's like a monthly news item in Mossheimat.
Also also, third world cities built on hilly terrain have catastrophic landslides on the regular.
Grand Island is pretty much safe from that.
A while ago didn't we try to create some index to indicate the likelihood nature would harm/kill you in various locations? Fires and landslides and earthquakes in CA, alligators and hurricanes in FL, deer ticks in the northeast.
None of this directly answering ajay, who seems to be talking about wholesale Sodom and Gomorrah incidents, but does strongly back up heebie's 8. I bet someone here even studies the literature or oral culture of poor people and can offer useful perspective.
oral culture of poor people
Probably whoever is doing strep throat tests in the neighborhood.
Also, and I need to fucking go sleep now, the aforementioned mountains of Roc North suggest to me the prospect of citywide airconditioning. You know it's going to be a growth industry.
Yeah, and also how come no one has invented a microwave that cools things instead of heat them?
dalriata makes some good points: OK, looks like most major cities in Europe probably have been seriously damaged at some point in history.
how come no one has invented a microwave that cools things instead of heat them?
Nikola Tesla probably invented one and then threw it away figuring that no one would be interested.
The Peshtigo fire was pretty big.
Also industrial accidents. Oil towns, Bhopal, Halifax.
Cleveland, except nobody lived on the river.
45: All our good wishes won't help if you don't get a good night's sleep.
YES. Goodnight. Be rude to me if I reappear before 2300GMT.
The oral culture of the poor people I study noted that they didn't destroy their city last time the government asked them to (1960s), because they were too poor to rebuild. You could argue that parts of the city got destroyed in the construction boom of the 2000s/2010s, except the city was too small to have much to remove, and by then they realized the old buildings were valuable for tourism so kept them around. Gentrification was actively destroying one village, but Chinese gentrification is weird in that the gentrifiers were trying to gentrify out the local government, so finally they got kicked out. (not really relevant except I think it's sort of funny).
But in other news, as 22 notes, the Chinese are pretty nervous about climate change. In addition to sea levels messing with the economic powerhouses in Southern China, desertification is a massive problem in Northern China, and Beijing will be in the Gobi desert in the near future if current trends continue.
or oral culture of poor people
Right. ajay fails to reckon with the fact that bacterial sputum tests reveal that inadequate sanitation among poor people caused diseases that wiped out many cities.
(Not pwned by 39, but inspired by it.)
Climate change is already happening and we will have no choice but to deal. The numbers make it clear that nothing we can do outside of some dramatic scientific discovery will significantly change the substantial warming we'll experience.
Yes, we'll deal, like theoretical frogs being boiled slowly.
But, we shouldn't get too committed to the idea that the disasters we are seeing this year are directly linked to climate change.
We are currently smothered with smoke from the wildfires in the west, though the ash has stopped falling. It feels apocalyptic. This morning, I was trying to convince myself that it's not all that different from clouds, but that's wishful thinking. It does not feel normal or natural and red suns at ten o'clock do feel like dystopias.
I'm waiting for everyone realize Chicago is the safest place in the lower 48, and drive up my home value. Then I'll cash out and move to Manitoba.
This particular August/September so far has been bizarrely unseasonably pleasant here, and I really can't make sense of it.
Schadenfreude in re: Houston?
If China moves Beijing south, the Republican line will be that they're really committed to the hoax.
I've surely mentioned before that I have a case in the USVI. Had a brief due Tuesday, and we had to rush to get it in before the court closed early. My St Thomas co-counsel reports today that she's ok, but the island is a mess.
My first VI case, in the 90s, arose from port-Marilyn construction.
Here, it's just mostly smoke. As noted, I went to a friend's house to collect objects with sentimental value last week. The fire is still about 1.5 miles away from his house, but you never know. Other folks we know have been evacuated, and gone through the triage of their possessions thing -- but forest fires are different from hurricanes or floods, in that while Barbuda can get hit by Jose a week after getting hit by Irma, when the forest around your house burns, you won't have another for 40 years at least.
I don't think we'll learn much over the next 30 years.
Hopefully Mueller will finish his report by then.
I remember from a biography of LInnaeus I read some years ago two things: that he made his money "curing" the syphilis of cavalry officers in Stockholm with the then medically approved method of drinking Rhine wine till the symptoms went away; and that in around 1704, a plague outbreak in Stockholm killed one third of the population. I believe the Black Death, 250 years earlier, had actually killed half the population of Norway.
So, yes, catastrophe recovery was built into the memory of most cities. Don't think it happened to Vienna, though, until 1945.
It looks like I'll be going to the Bahamas at the end of the month to assess hurricane damage. This is the third straight year they've had a Category 4, and its getting to be a regular gig for me.
59: Assess damage to property you own? Or are you going as disaster review, structural evaluation teams, or something else?
In the interest of looking for the best in everyone: you can count on Matt Drudge having a link to the most current NOAA hurricane cone at or near the top of his front page. No need to remember the complicated NOAA link to same. (Bookmarks? What are those?)
Who needs a cone? That thing's headed straight for Mar-a-Lago.
The wind probabilities with Jose coming up behind now look like a couple of dicks getting it on. Clearly punishment for acceptance of gays in America.
Or are you going as disaster review, structural evaluation teams, or something else?
Disaster review to figure out the total economic damage, and help contribute to a plan for recovery. My job is to look at the telecommunications and power sectors. So I end up looking at a lot of broken utility poles.
58
Yeah, the black plague is the reason that written Norwegian is Danish. The plague killed off all literate Norwegians, basically, and then when Denmark took over they imposed Danish as the official language. Although pronunciation differs, the written languages have remained pretty much the same.
It's also why Norwegian language politics are so tense. Standard Norwegian is Norwegian-ified Danish, and Nynorsk (New Norwegian) was an attempt to revive an "authentic" Norwegian language based on Western Norwegian dialects that are closer to spoken Norwegian from before the plague. (Remote fishing villages in Western Norway escaped the plague due to isolation). (The language differences were sort of racialized in the 19th century (to the extent ethnic Norwegians can be considered different "races")) and then during The War Nynorsk became associated with the Resistance.)
67.1: Either the plague or the mistress of a visiting Swedish cavalry office.
65
Wow, that sounds like an important job. Since you would know, are the Caribbean islands getting progressively better at managing hurricanes?
58.2 is fascinating -- I knew about the two versions of Norwegian but nothing about the history. Thank you. Curious now about why the plague was so particularly devastating there. I have a history of Scandinavia a few steps from the resting-bed that will probably provide an answer.
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My ankle is improving in direct proportion to my ability to lie still and not walk around on it, so it remains to be seen if it heals before I go stark fucking "Yellow Wallpaper" mad. I am the exact opposite of Thorn the dualist this week.
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Hey ankle buddy. It turns out my idea of a sprain was false, I am allergic to bee stings and got stung (toe) just before a bunch of stuff happened, so I only checked quickly for spreading tick ring or spider necrosis. I missed the sign of the embedded stinger. The next night I played ball so I think broke up the stinger or otherwise dissipated the venom/antigen bundle on up into the middle of my calf.
Calf is getting better now, no bouts of fever last night, but a couple of nights back I was honest to goodness considering whether a melon baller or a drill was my best way to fall asleep.
So it could be worse is what I'm saying. I recommend light sitcoms or detective dramas, Mindy or Rockford. Either Mindy.
Curious now about why the plague was so particularly devastating there. I have a history of Scandinavia a few steps from the resting-bed that will probably provide an answer.
It may not have been particularly devastating in Scandinavia compared to other places; many port cities lost incredible numbers of people (often majorities of the population). Norway may just have had a lower literacy rate to start with.
You'd get tired sooner with the melon baller, right? Keep improving. As for me, I made it over to the shelf to retrieve the history of Scandinavia, which will save me from the state of mind in which I apparently read an entire Calvin Trillin memoir article in the New Yorker and considered sharing it with my family. Maybe I'm supposed to go back to the ER and get a CT scan if that happens.
I understand that zebra mussels are not equally devastating in all environments as well.
73: NW's original comment 58 said "half the population." But if it's a maritime phenomenon, then yeah, that would explain it.
Your doctor left instructions as to what to do if you read a Calvin Trillin memoir?
Yes. Also if I buy any Eileen Fisher garment or forget the names of immediate family members.
It's good that you have a doctor who really listens to you.
The numbers I've heard are 25-50%, with it being probably over at least a third. It decimated all urban areas, and Norway's literate population was small and almost entirely concentrated in cities. It killed off the Norwegian royal family and the entire nobility, which is why 1) a crisis of succession allowed the Danes to step in via the proposal of a unified Scandinavia under Danish control, and 2) Norway never developed a feudal system or any class system to speak of, but remained as a mostly rural peasant colony of a larger power until its independence.
(Yes yes pedants, this is a bit of a simplification of 500+ years of Norwegian history.)
IIRC (yeah I know I could check this but why do that) the Plague entered Norway via Bergen, which was a Hansa city. I read something about a ghost ship of rats bringing it, but that was either Norway or the UK.
Since you would know, are the Caribbean islands getting progressively better at managing hurricanes?
Yes, I have seen some slow, but positive developments. There is a parimutuel insurance system set up among the various countries now, which is helpful. But that mainly pays off after a hurricane, as opposed to funding disaster risk reduction needs up front.
The big thing I've been pushing for is a cell phone-based alerting system that would let people know when a disaster is on its way. Its not quite so necessary for a hurricane like this one that everyone has seen coming for the past week. But a couple of years ago, Hurricane Joaquin took an unexpected left turn overnight and flattened a couple islands where people had no idea it was coming. Fortunately no-one died, but a lot of money could have been saved if an alert message on peoples cell phone had warned them to batten down the hatches in time. Progress on this issue has been excruciatingly slow.
There is also the broader problem of, tiny populations scattered across far-flung islands, with infrastructure maintained at high expense, is ultimately not going to be sustainable in the face of sea-level rise and increased storm activity. But that's a long-term problem and there is still a lot of resistance to facing it. Nobody wants to hear that their nice sea-side town has to move up the hill, much less to another island.
I googled Eileen Fisher. If you want to stay as far as possible from that clothing, you should just buy one of those red and black flannel hats with the ear flaps.
83: But that's like another $8. Paying for content sucks.
63: I really hope it's not coming straight for Mar-a-Lago, because while I loathe The Island and virtually everyone associated with it, a direct hit there would be devastating for my family (and everyone else who lives in PB County, many who are poor and working class).
Meanwhile, Gov. Shithead keeps saying that the dike on Lake Okeechobee has been reinforced, and will hold, but I will believe it when I see it, and happily proclaim I was wrong to ever doubt. Seriously, though, if Lake O floods we'll be in Their Eyes Were Watching God territory, decimating deeply impoverished sugar cane farming towns in which the only realistic way out is literally the NFL.
Also, I quite like Calvin Trillin's memoirs.
I need to stop worrying about this hurricane...
Hey, ankle friends! After a year I've stopped saying I have a sprained ankle and instead answered that I have tendon damage in my right ankle, which sounds less careless and more sophisticated and doesn't raise the question of when I injured it. Today I went to gentle rather than moderate water aerobics, wore shoes with cushioning in the water, and still ended up with a sore and angry ankle. Plus I'm really inflexible on the sprain/sciatica/misery side, though not so bad on my other. Blech. Tomorrow I will figure out what to say about how white people care about heroin because addiction happens to white people. I still haven't finished reading Dreamland, but it claims at least the initial cartels wouldn't sell to anyone black as a safety precaution to avoid drawing police attention IIRC. But more later.
87: Nothing wrong with it! Nor with Eileen Fisher, despite my complex feelings about social class. Just out of character for me.
89: Take your time. Googling "heroin addiction racial disparity," because I know zilch about this, I found this Frontline report from a year and a half ago. It includes charts of heroin overdose death rates broken down by ethnicity, 2010-14. Dreamland looks good.
I'm not up on my plague demography anymore but IIRC, in the 400 or so years after the Black Death*, some European cities were hit with multiple plague epidemics that killed at least 20% of the population.
*I think Marseilles got the last one in Western Europe, around 1720.
Thanks for the political sequelae to the Black Death in Norway, Buttercup. I didn't know about those. It makes perfect sense that a country where the population is concentrated on the coasts would suffer horribly from a seaborne plague. I know there's a tiny flattish bit down from Oslo, and it was Norway all the way to Kungälv then, but still ...
Can you explain whether there are two distinguishable spoken languages? I only hear a variety of dialects, and couldn't possibly say which was which, though the written difference is clear and there are some trigger words I can't now remember.
And, returning to the original subject, there is now a fucking great earthquake off the coast of Mexico which will presumably produce tsunamis all along the coasts of Central America -- though I don't believe the Reuters warning that they will reach as far as Ecuador.
94: While on the other side of Mexico, yet another major hurricane is expected to land soon.
I've shifted my leisure reading to histories of the falls of republican governments and dystopian and apocalyptic fiction.
I guess this belongs here: https://twitter.com/ssohardd/status/903798480510099458/photo/1
96- How is that different from following the news now?
Naked Capitalism is calling for the revolution now: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/09/violence-state-prelude.html
I'm in a relevant country (Barry told me to come up with a name and I didn't, so I only have myself to blame for not having one) and getting married imminently. My family arrived last night and checked into this hotel about 15 minutes before everything started shaking. Myself and the heavily pregnant bride-to-be (again, sorry Barry - no name) evacuated down 30-odd flights of stairs. My family seemed to think that the sirens etc were a delightful local custom and just chilled in their rooms until everything stopped moving.
I'm glad you're O.K, but also congratulation.
The 's' was blown away by a hurricane.
98: congratulations. The obvious name for your country would be "El Dorado" but open to suggestions.
El Guapo, after the second-greatest movie villain of all time.
98: Holy cow. Congratulations!
Congrats Seeds! And glad you're all ok.
Argh! I started writing a comment and lost it. Shorter answer to 93, I wouldn't say Nynorsk and Bokmaal (or Riksmaal or Samnorsk) are distinct enough to be considered different languages, as they're both mutually intelligible and have fairly minor differences in syntax and lexicon. There are lots of dialects, but again AFAIK they're mostly all mutually intelligible (again, all these concepts are quite fuzzy, and what is a dialect vs. register vs. variant or whether these terms actually describe distinct things is as clear as mud.) Here's a pretty accessible article on Norwegian dialects by a sociolinguist from U Oslo.
http://folk.uio.no/unnr/Dialects%20in%20Norway.pdf
Jan-Petter Blom is also an early Norwegian sociolinguist who studied Norwegian dialects, and he wrote a famous piece on "code-switching" in the 1970s.
98
Glad everyone is ok! Did the wedding happen?
