Comment by metalman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metalman | Hacker News Reader

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No.These types of things are unavoidable. The full risk profile of our planet is immpossible to determine. Should some great portion of the risk profile be determined, it will cover essentialy everywhere. Even reducing it to stuff with a fractional percentage of a disaster per year will be forbiding. And there is absolutly no way to impliment a country wide action and response network that does not end up running everything through the all powerfull department of saftey, which is politicaly and practicaly immpossible.

bottom land is always, flat, near water, productive, with many other resources on the hills and in the river, and then occasionaly, a trap

Just telling people not to live on fucking flood plains, goes nowhere......it is a perenial recuring problem that is so common and ancient that it has been recognised by archiologists, that humans have exploited the resources in river valleys, built there settlements, and then denuded all of the vegitation, and then blam, a flood, and there settlement gets instantly burried, bad for then, awsome for archiologists who find all there stuff, in water logged soil, interesting organic artifacts are often in "perfect" condition.

It was avoidable and in fact, whole countries manage to avoid it. It took series of bad intentional decisions for this to happen the way it did.

And fun fact is that people who made those bad decisions first falsely blamed others, congratulated themselves on being awesome. And now that they want money from FEMA, they still want to destroy it. And they still want to cut weather prediction which they blamed despite being correct.

> these types of things are unavoidable

The floodings or the tragedies?

> The full risk profile of our planet is impossible to determine

Was this really necessary to avoid this specific tragedy?

> The full risk profile of our planet is impossible to determine

This is a classic 'unless we can have a perfect solution to the problem, we shouldn't do anything all' argument. It is usually applied to problems where the solutions involve helping non-rich people.

Nirvana fallacy

Each individual doesn't need the full risk profile for the planet, only a local subset. That's much easier to model and make assumptions. Like "this is a river, it could flood. How likely and how bad?".

At a very high level, you are technically correct - existence is inherently risky and, try as we might, we can't always prevent disaster from striking. Disaster will strike again, somewhere.

At a more macro level, we certainly do understand relative risks of specific areas after interacting with them long enough. We begin to get a better picture of what makes one flood plain significantly more dangerous than another. There are instances where things like this can be avoided, or at least mitigated to a certain degree.

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