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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

>You cannot escape them. It is a case of pick your poison.

This is the law of averages, and it is not a law, it is a flaw in the way people think.

No matter whether you think that you'll go when it's your time to go and not a second before, and that none of the decisions that you make will affect when that will happen - it's still more dangerous to live on the inside of an active volcano than on a plain in central Illinois, you shouldn't drive the wrong direction on the freeway, and you should always wear a helmet on your motorcycle, even during short trips.

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You seem to have chosen to intentionally misinterpret my remark. In Florida, hurricanes. In the plains, tornadoes. On the coast, tsunamis and flooding. On the west coast of the u.s., earthquakes. And if you eliminate forest fires, you a) increase the odds the next one will be far worse and b) interfere with the reproduction of some pine trees whose seeds need high heat to open.

Yes, your choices matter. No, there are no perfectly safe places anywhere.

Nowhere is completely safe but I think that Northern Europe is pretty much safe from all those things. There is occasionally some localised flooding if you are in the wrong place and we can get occasional strong winds (less than proper hurricanes). Of course past performance is no guarantee of future results...black swans... etc. but there are places in the world at very low risk of serious natural disasters.

Northern Europe has harsher winters than I care for. You can freeze to death in the snow...etc. And the odds are long against me moving there any time soon. I can readily go anywhere in the continental U.S.

I have actually seriously considered such things. I have previously lived in Europe. I have been willing to consider living potentially anywhere in the world. There are substantial obstacles for the average person for up and moving wherever the fuck place name you pulled out of a hat.

For the climate issue try the UK then or somewhere in France. Moderate winters and summers in the UK. Within the US I'm sure there is somewhere with modest risks although perhaps many of those places are too cold for you in the winter.

I'm not saying that you should move and it may be that the earthquakes of SF [replace hazard and location as appropriate] are a reasonable risk for other advantages and can be managed sufficiently with construction techniques. However, not every place on the planet is at equal risk of natural disasters.

I think you and I are framing this issue differently and I hate conversations focused on who "wins" by making the other person "lose." There are trade-offs involved no matter where you live as an individual. I have thought long and hard about those trade-offs and I am reasonably confident I have found my least worst answer for the foreseeable future for me personally. That is a separate issue from the question of what kind of power is a realistic, viable option to serve the interests of a specific country and what trade-offs a country needs to consider when trying to provide for all the needs of its people and its own needs as an entity. Context matters and these are always complicated issues. It generally does not work to let a single consideration take too much priority in a complex situation, though there are exceptions.

Thank you for engaging me in good faith.

>You seem to have chosen to intentionally misinterpret my remark.

Not intentionally.

>No, there are no perfectly safe places anywhere.

No one is arguing that there are perfectly safe places anywhere, so I'm not sure who you're making that point to. People are making the case that there are safer ways to do things, and more dangerous ways to do things, so we should choose the safer ways.

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