Red States Brace for Disasters Of Climate, but Won't Name It
Red states obviously are smarter than Blue states, do not engage in propaganda, lies and theft of citizens money for "story time" clinmat BS, and still recognize changes happen all the time, and you need to be prepared. Sounds like Red states are smart, Blue states simpletons...
I agree. That's part of the problem with natural disasters. The risk is so low but the impact so high that conventional risk assessment methods with respect to insurance don't work.
"Otherwise you are still subsidizing the cost of the risky areas to the less risky ones."
That's the way any insurance policy works, yet I don't see anyone here objecting to private insurance. The problem is that the private methods to this point don't create a viable product - they're either so horribly expensive as to be unaffordable or they cover so little as to be useless.
"On might say Idaho should have one for fires, with it being one of the top hotspots for wildfires."
That's what happens when you have a State full of forests controlled by the Federal government... Western Montana isn't much better.
The idea that a collective/mob via mob rule can tell someone they have to relinquish their basic rights and their privately owned assets to the mob is the letter of the concept of collectivism/mob rule. Just on that principle alone - if you can't get that - then there is no rational arguing with you.
Even if I lived in the middle of the floodway - the mob still doesn't have a right to force me to give up my rights or assets. They don't have the right to force me to move out of the area - nor do they then have the right to take away my basic human rights or assets.
Ridiculous.
In that scenario it sets up the situation for people in Galveston to profit from people in Dallas. If the people in Galveston want to have a program, let them do it - but they do not get to impose it on people outside of their jurisdiction. If that makes Galveston more expensive to live, then it is a reflection of the risk. It is one thing for the people of Galveston to vote to tax themselves, it is another for them to be able to vote to tax residents of cities hundreds of miles away. Or perhaps the county level would even be fine. But state level would only make sense if the actual risk and damage was evenly distributed. Otherwise you are still subsidizing the cost of the risky areas to the less risky ones.
About the only scenario where that state-level risk and damage cost might apply that I can see is Florida - the entire state does seem to get hit from time to time. But that may still be too broad as I am not as familiar with the detailed patterns there. I do know that Miami-Dade county has the highest risk even among Florida as it is the single largest "target" of hurricanes in the country.
The catch is also not just some official risk. For example, Idaho is among the highest states with an official risk for earthquakes. But almost nobody knows it. Why? Because despite the geological risk, the actual risk of a damaging quake is really low. As a result, few people have insurance for it - despite the fact it is 5th in the nation for frequency averaging almost one every other week.
Which brings us to a functional problem with all states having something. Things change, and laws change even slower. Tornadoes, for example, are becoming less common in Tornado alley as they seem to be moving eastward. Good luck convincing a state government that they don't need as much money or programs when the risk decreases.
On might say Idaho should have one for fires, with it being one of the top hotspots for wildfires. But the reality is that most of the land there is wilderness and the fires rarely affect many people. They are generally limited to people who live in "cabins" and arrested houses. But they number a paltry few compared to the rest of the state.
So the idea that you can quantify the risk of living in an area even at the state level is dubious at best - Florida notwithstanding.
If you're here to argue with people, then yes you are wasting your time. We aren't going to bend to what you believe just because you think we should. We aren't going to bend to your judgement just because you hold yourself as the gatekeeper of what truth and Objectivism are. Your appeals to authority are as unconvincing as your ad hominems.
It is a tricky needle to thread when it comes to disaster activity. Years ago in Idaho we had people (generally wealthy people) wanting to build houses down in a well known flood plain for the Snake River in Eagle. The codes at the time prevented building housing there at all. Of course they argued it had been years since it had flooded (because a few years matters in a ten year flood zone, amirite? ;) ) so they should be allowed to.
Much to my surprise the general consensus in the area at the time was "ok, but only if you agree the city will do nothing to help you when it floods - not even rescue you". In hindsight it should not have been so surprising. After all we had spent years witnessing millions being spent rescuing one or two people here and there and some of them more than once. There had been much public outcry of "why are we doing this?" around that subject. That sense of personal responsibility had been poked at enough I suppose. I moved away shortly thereafter so I don't know what eventually came of it. But that rescue aspect still holds, and I suspect they got to build there with no concessions. To be fair, some of them were willing to agree to that condition.
You can say whatever you want about personal responsibility for property. However, many people have a hard time "standing down" instead of rescuing people from natural disasters - even if it isn't them doing the actual rescuing. It is one reason that people in Texas hundreds of miles away from the hurricane and floods hitch up their boats and drive to Louisiana to help. As a result, convincing people that the local government should "let people drown" is a poor battle to choose regardless of your principles. So even outside of paying to rebuild a house, there are costs to living in a disaster prone area.
So while limiting it to paying for property replace/repair seems easy, it is only the easiest part of the topic. I've found that many people one on one agree that someone should be responsible for paying for insurance for it or you're on your own. But get them in a group where someone starts playing heartstrings and that rationality usually seems to evaporate.
The problem is that we rarely isolate those when we should be doing just that. A structure where there is "cleanup & damage control of 'public property'" and "rescue and aid efforts for people during the event" as two separate budget lines, and none for private property cleanup and damage control would be a damned good start. You'd probably have to specifically exclude private property recover though.
I lay them out that way because trying to exclude either of the included ones makes one look foolish and heartless (in that order); and doing that doesn't help the cause of the excluded one. If you can get that structure in place you won't need to mandate flood insurance as you aren't protecting people from their lack of risk mitigation and planning. It wouldn't take more than 1-2 disasters to clear that up. Well, absent state and national subsidy of course.
1. A group of people agreeing to do things is not a collective i the sense you are using it
2. You can temporarily assign your rights to a group, it then has those rights
Starting with the first one, just because people get together on things does not make them collectivist. You don't have to live in a given area, you can choose to move. The trick to an actual collective in the sense you're using it is that you can't not be a part of it.
According to your argument, your argument of private insurance violates your basic principles. By what right does the insurance agency have to impose fees, alter pricing, and decide who gets the help and does not? In isolation: none. However, they are not in isolation - they are created by the people who choose to be a part of them. Just like any venture, the organization has the rights assigned to it by the people who comprise it. Governments aren't any different in principle either. A government exists and has rights in relation to those that were assigned to it, and with regards to other governments.
The argument you make, you basic principles as you put them, means there can be absolutely no form of government at all. Pure anarchy; not even anarcho-capitalism, as legitimate because in your view it is a collective. I maintain your basic premises are flawed as a result. If I don't have the "right" to form groups with rules your entire notion of individual rights falls.
Lets posit a small town along a river (we have a lot of those here in Texas, so it isn't an unreasonable position). Say we have a thousand people living there. They all agree to pool their resources for disaster recovery by paying into a central fund run by the town that pays out to recover costs of rebuilding or repairing after floods. According to you they somehow do not have that right. However, that is a violation of your basic principle since people have the right to decide what to do with their property, and to form associations.
Now say you choose to move to that town. Are you then subject to that law? Yes. Is it a violation of your rights? No. Just as you can choose to move to a floodplain and are responsible, by your own argument, for the consequences, so too are you responsible for the consequences of moving to that town. Just, as you say, as it is your responsibility to determine the risk of floods it is also your responsibility to determine and judge the legal aspects of where you choose to move to. You don't get to claim one but not the other.
And your straw man about "don't violate individual rights under the guise of protecting a non-existent collectivist right" is called out for what it is. Nobody has posited, or at least I have not, a "non-existent collective right". Now back to the no-group rights notion.
This notion that a group or organization has no rights is flawed, and fatally so. According to that notion, which you espoused, governments either can not exists, or one government can take over another. After all, the right to exist doesn't exist for non-individual in your premise. This is where the relational context matters.
The right for a group to exist is predicated on the members assigning it. If that right does not exist, then people do not have a right to form groups. Now that group so formed has the right to exist. It now also has rights in regards to other groups. Not other individuals, but other groups. The largest context, and most obvious at play here, is a government. In that context a government formed by its people, and allowed to continue existing, has the right in relation to other governments to exist. This is a proper formulation of delegation of rights and powers. It has the fundamental rights with regards to other governments, and whatever powers or rights within that framework granted to it by its constituents.
We can see this most spectacularly played out in The Old West. Note: not the "Wild West", so dispel that image from your mind. In The Old West (the time before the Civil War), the West was what we'd recognize as anarcho-capitalist. The people formed associations and organizations that were their government. There were no geographical limitations or exclusions. By that I mean I could be under my association's laws and across the street, or hallway in the hotel, you would be under yours.
When there was an issue between people of differing jurisdictions the individual boards, the governments, would hammer it out between them unless one side agreed to go by the rules of the other. It worked out surprisingly well. You could even choose to switch to a different jurisdiction if they would have you. You could also be expelled from a jurisdiction.
This historical example epitomizes the basic principle of elective government and individual choice. However, it also demonstrates that the governments so formed have rights with regard to each other, and among their members as assigned to them by said members. This working example of anarcho-capitalism is perhaps the largest lost casualty of the Civil War.
While we do not enjoy that level of flexibility today, as you have argued you can choose where to live. If you don't want to participate in the local rules about disasters, don't live there. And be more precise in your use of the term collectivist and collective.
Now in closing lets briefly discuss why the "but I live a mile or two away" argument fails in the context of local government response. You have two fundamental choices: either that government does absolutely nothing in the case of a flood, or it does something. That something will have some cost associated with it. Even if it is just cleaning up the streets or its own offices, possibly damage repair. I could argue that during the event the responsibility of law enforcement still applies to it, so it would need to be prepared for that and that will cost more. Therefore, despite you and I living outside of the flood zone, there is still an added cost to living in the area.
That is a cost and consequence of living in a jurisdiction that includes the flood-prone area we chose to not live directly in. All arguments about choosing to not live in a flood zone apply to living in a jurisdiction that includes one.
"In short - to answer your question about should parents be responsible for their children - that is circumstantial."
And that's precisely my point. You took the concept of "personal responsibility" and turned it into a principle thus: "I should be responsible to the nth degree for everything that may possibly happen to me regardless of whether I have any control over it." It's prima faciae absurd. Context always matters in the application of a principle. (See what I did there mixing in an absolute with a conditional?)
I did respond to you about the military - I said it is one of the core functions that the government has been tasked with - so in that case I did not have a problem with it - at least in the same way - and I also stated that I could argue that even the military could be privatized.
Absolutes have their place. Throwing a complex issue out about parents responsibility for their kids does not change my points. You think because it is an absolute that is inherently wrong - sometimes that is true - sometimes not. Would you argue not to make it an absolute that people should not kill each other in cold blood? Are you absolutely opposed to slavery? Are you absolutely opposed to racism? There are plenty of basic premises that very well should be absolutes.
In short - to answer your question about should parents be responsible for their children - that is circumstantial. In terms of taking care of them, making sure they are educated, etc... yes. If the teenage child is violent towards their single mom and run away and then do bad stuff while the mom has no direct control over them - then no and it is on the teenager. Kids are their owns people and are not always able to be supervised by the parents - such as while they are in school - so responsibility for them in terms of them doing bad things has some relativity to their custodians at the time. In terms of longer issues of parenting issues - then this would move back to the realm of the parents - such as schools not trying to make non-emergency medical decisions for the child verses the parents. In general, primarily the parents should be - but as I said in the beginning - it is circumstantial.
That being said - it is not circumstantial in when the government by use of coercion - override individual rights. It is inherently ridiculous to say people have individual rights when the government can ignore them when they see fit. Then there is no individual rights - and we are just slaves and tools of the state. That is the extreme. Protecting individual rights is not extreme.
That was never my point or intention. I simply pointed out that you were taking such an extreme position with regard to personal responsibility that it was untenable and unrealistic.
You've chosen an absolute - an extreme absolute - as your position. That's your choice, but it makes the position vulnerable to rebuttal via the illustration of any exception. I already provided one: national defense. You had no counter-argument. I'll pose a second: should parents be responsible for the actions of their children? If so, why? If not, why not?
But whatever. You want to holler ad hominem and skedaddle - that's your choice. Have a nice day.
Um, all of those are your subjective opinions about me, therefore by definition they are ad hominem attacks. They occur from abject ignorance, as you know nothing about me and assume that you are the only one with "true" vision. I challenge you to re-examine your premises, because as soon as you hold that you are the only one who sees something clearly, you're really the only one with their eyes shut.
It's clear that you're not willing to have a reasonable discussion, so I'll bid you adieu.
Speaking Objectively - it simply is not proper to have government taking from people, with whatever title you want to give to it, to give to others. It is a violation of individual rights.
If insurance company A has one customer and the customer has a flood insurance policy - and they live on the top of a mountain. The insurnace company knows the risk that they will ever have a payout on the customer is EXTREMELY unlikely - so the customer's premium is pretty low. But, the company still has to hold a certain amount of liquid assets IN CASE they manage to be flooded. This scales. If Company A has 100 thousand customers on the coast of Florida - obviously they will have to charge much higher rates and have much larger holdings in case of a hurricane. Insurance companies operating the way they should - should have enough liquid assets as to be ready for mass damage - such as from hurricanes. So just because the scale of the damage area gets large - is not a reason to assume the insurance companies cannot handle it. They should be able to unless they are not being run properly - so back to the efficiency side of things - they are still in a better place to respond efficiently than government - and most importantly - they are private and people are not forced to be their customer.
Basic premises here - the high level arguments are pointless when the basic premises are the primaries - don't violate individual rights under the guise of protecting a non-existent collectivist right. Collectives DO NOT HAVE RIGHTS. A collective is only a group of individuals and one individual's rights do not come at the expense of another's. Nor, do the wants/needs of multiple individuals justify the trampling of other's individual rights.
Anyway, I'll keep this short. It is not an ad hominem attack to point out that you are ignoring reality, have weak arguments, and don't understand Objectivism. That's not an attack on your character or personal traits - it is a statement about your rational and understanding of the premises at hand. I didn't say you are an idiot, stupid, ugly, smell bad, etc... If you honestly think it follows Objectivist philosophy to argue for why the government should take from one group to give to another - then you do no understand Objectivism. Period. Simple as that. Fact.
If you refuse to acknowledge that people assume risk by choosing where they live and shouldn't mitigate their risks on their own - simply because they don't want to get hit by 'X' natural event - when the area they move to is prone to natural event 'X' - then you are ignoring reality and ceding the concept of personal responsibility. When you keep trying to defend this by making arguments based on ignoring this reality and not acknowledging the basic premises that you are violating one set of individuals rights by redistributing their wealth to another group of individuals - you are ignoring reality and NOT being Objectivist.
I don't care what your profile says - or whether or not you have a $ by your name - what does that prove? I am going by what you are saying and arguing now.
If you want to put this in the private sector where people have freedom of choice - then we have no argument - as I said from the beginning. But thus far - you have been arguing with me about the case of government forcing the issue - in that case my points stand.
And you didn't listen - I said I quite the job of dealing with Floodplain Admin. I was sold into it as one much lesser thing but after going through all the training on what and how it was supposed to be done - I got out. I think it is a total unconstitutional overstep of government power - in so many ways - and I explained that as my reasons when I left the position. Unlike your position here where you apparently think it is not an overreach and are arguing to expand on that overreach by forcing people to effectively pay for national "natural disaster insurance"/tax - as no tax is insurance (like Social Security - sold to the public as an insurance when it is simply a tax).
You are in Galt's Gulch here - correct? If you are here because you support Objectivism - then you must see how government enforcing this idea via taxation is anti-Objectivist, anti-life, anti-freedom, anti-reason, coercion, etc. If you do not accept Objectivism - well that's another topic.
realclimatescience.com/
that publishes some of the metrics you mention.
It isn't about blame, it is about responsibility for choices made. We can't predict when a disaster will hit, but that is irrelevant. Butte, Montana is not getting hit by a hurricane any time soon - likely not in our lifetime. So people in Montana have no reason to be forced to spend money on Hurricane insurance or recovery funding. Nor should building codes there reflect hurricane resistance.
They can, however, expect to get snowed in from time to time and have the occasional blizzard. So they should be prepared to handle them via such routes as in situ food, medical, and energy supply/caching.
If you don't want to suffer/prepare for a blizzard, you can live in places that don't normally get them. If you don't want to get hit by a hurricane, then you can, for example, move to Montana.
You can even mitigate certain risks in higher risk areas. San Antonio has flooding issues - but only in certain areas. When I moved here I took that into account and moved to one of the highest hills in the area - and about 10ft from the peak at that. Flooding will not be taking out my house in my lifetime. Note, by the way, that this isn't a rich vs poor thing here: the most expensive areas to live in the city are in the flood prone areas. We're middle class up here in the hills.
But again it isn't about blame, but rewarding risky behavior or choices - or more accurately not punishing making the safer choices. The fundamental issue as I see it is this:
Why should I, having made the choice to live where the flooding will not harm my property, be forced to pay to rebuild the house of someone who chose to live in the high risk (as in - it happens. every. year.) zones - especially when they make more than I do and have houses more expensive than mine?
Certain risks are as close to inevitable as can be expected. Live in Florida long enough and you will be dealing with a hurricane, for example. Live in Tornado alley long enough and you will be dealing with a Tornado. Live in Montana long enough and you will be dealing with snow. Live in the flat or low parts of San Antonio long enough (ie. for a year) and you will be dealing with flood waters.
The distinction isn't irrelevant, but core to the issue.
That's like saying that you're responsible when you get mugged simply for traveling to a city with a high crime rate.
No it isn't.
Now as to the efficiency argument I find it neither compelling nor reliable. I'll explain the latter.
The reason the government is no better at, say, hurricane insurance than the private sector is the scope of when it happens. A fire in most places (especially outside of dense cities and California), doesn't take out whole cities and counties at the same time. So the provider can soak a house or building here and there.
However, when half of, or an entire, city gets wiped out at once the immediate cost in terms of funding and processing that is enormous. The need to have that kind of money sitting around waiting (liquid, essentially) is untenable to managing money properly. If I've skimmed/read your two's arguments correctly here you've argued that nowhere is w/o risk. This counters the claim of government efficiency - at least at a national level. Sure, the government might be considered "more efficient" at collecting money from people with the threat of force than a voluntary private insurance company/system, but I don't view that as better or desirable.
Why should Californians pay for Floridians to have their houses rebuilt after a hurricane, if the Floridians don't pay for Californians to rebuild theirs after a quake or wildfire? They shouldn't. Now if they are paying for each other, it is no more efficient than if they just paid for their own area locally. Indeed, it is less efficient because of the added overhead of managing it at the interstate level. Even then it descends into whomever has the more expensive housing benefits the most unless you tie it to property value - ie. a federal property tax.
But the other effect of that scenario is that it pushes cost onto people who have chosen, or do, live in areas that are less risky. Wildfires happen nearly every year in California. Hurricanes nearly every year in Florida. That puts a high cost on any program to cover rebuilding costs. Now why should Idahoans who don't have those risks pay those high costs? In most decades Floridians will not be paying to rebuild houses in Idaho from natural disasters. So year after year the Idahoans are bearing a financial burden for those who choose to live in (expensive) risky locations. That isn't very efficient for them - especially considering they already have lower cost insurance for their lower risk area that they pay for.
That is where you lose any alleged efficiency. It is also where your argument that a national general disaster fund benefits everyone who is forced to pay into it falls down. People in Idaho and Montana, for example, can - and do - go a lifetime of never needing it. Meanwhile people in California, Florida - and the other gulf states, for example, can expect to be using it at least once every few years. Further those places will frequently get hit hard enough to require enormous sums of money in a short window which requires high rates and large reserves - reserves that can quickly be depleted in a single event.
So yes, there will be people who do not benefit from paying into the system - ever. It will be those who choose to not live in the high risk areas.
I find your argument that "getting people back to work quickly" (paraphrase) is a benefit not compelling as well. First, how quickly (or indeed if) a 7-11 reopens in Miami is irrelevant to someone in Boise. From that perspective, the argument fails. However, there is another one to consider as well.
That argument assumes the funding and efforts reliably result in a speedier recovery than a non-government option. History tells us this is not the normal case. Over the last decade, at least, private insurance had most houses rebuilt or rebuilding within the first year in gulf coast hurricane disasters, whereas the government assistance ones mostly took longer. I've known people in Katrina who gave up after several years, and some who still haven't got their promised federal aid. Thousands of households destroyed or damaged by Sandy in NY were still waiting as of late 2018 for their assistance. This is a common occurrence.
The government does not have a track record of getting people back to "normal" quickly after large scale disasters. Now in my view a lot of this is population density related (and nakedly inefficient bureaucracies), but nonetheless it is the reality we have to deal with.
Tornadoes in Tornado alley were, and are, more manageable due to their limited blast radius (as it were) and lower density. Smaller areas with lower population density and local efforts have a significantly better track record than the federal government.
Then we have such things as fund re-/mis-appropriation in federal programs. For example, one of the more recent changes in federal disaster recovery allows FEMA to use disaster recovery funds to "mitigate" damage before it happens. It shouldn't take a mathematician to know what that will do to the funding available when an actual disaster strikes.
My argument/issue here is with the scale of it being national; or in many cases even statewide. It simply does not scale. If the residents of, say Houston, want to impose a local property tax specifically to cover flood relief and response for their people, I say have at it. Will it be expensive? Perhaps. Or perhaps with it being them who pay they'll avoid needless "benefits" and keep it more reasonably costed. Perhaps they'll focus on recovery infrastructure and temporary housing rather than a bureaucracy that tries to do it all. Or maybe they'll try to do it all and fail terribly, and learn from that mistake. Maybe they'll start building better housing. For example if you go to Corpus Christi you'll see that nearly all beachfront houses (and even park administration buildings) are on stilts. Not the garage, usually, but the house itself is on stilts (even then it usually isn't an enclosed garage under the house - more of a carport). Why? because they get swell from hurricanes that don't hit them and doing that removes the need to rebuild the house. It does increase the cost of the construction, sure. As it should.
However they handle it, that resolves the issue of personal responsibility. If you don't like it, move elsewhere. If you are OK with it, stay or move there. The people taking the risk should be the people paying for the result when it, inevitably in many areas, happens.
And that is the other aspect of this pay-for-recovery setup: it reduces incentive to reflect the risk in the direct price. If making a house resilient to, say, 90% of the hurricanes it is likely to hit increases the cost by 15%, so be it. But if federal disaster relief covers the cost of replacement, that incentive is dramatically reduced. When we separate the cost of a thing from the person using the thing, we cause all sorts of problems. We can see this most heavily in healthcare and college, but it isn't limited to there.
If an area has a higher frequency of disastrous events such as floods, fires, or hurricanes, it should be more expensive to live there. Spreading that cost to people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away in safer areas subsidizes living in the riskier places. Thus, it is subsidizing the risker choice and penalizing the less-risky choice.
It isn't about blame, but about paying for the consequences of our choices or at least not paying for the choices of others. "Blame" is such a poor choice of argument here. Sure, maybe you aren't to "blame" (or be at fault) for your house getting hit by a tornado. Then again, neither am I so why should I be penalized for it? If someone who isn't "to be blamed" for it happening to them shouldn't have to pay for rebuilding their home, then neither should anyone else because there is no blame/fault to be assigned.
This is because you have to look at accurate metrics. For the moment, ignore the fact that NASA et. al. have been retroactively "lowering" the temperature records of the past. Let us look at more fundamental issues.
First up: to hell with the averages. First there is no "average global temperature". Sure, you could concoct one mathematically, but it won't tell you anything of value. Second, the average temperature is irrelevant. Anyone with a brain knows that it is going to be damned cold at the poles, and damned hot at the equator and that averaging all of that tells you nothing.
Next, let us look at the so-called "hottest records". Similarly to the average, what does some station somewhere hitting 102 degrees tell you about the climate or heat content of the planet? Nothing. Some of the disasterbators have cottoned on to this and will use an "average hottest temperature" - where they take all of the hottest readings and average them. This is really no different from the first averages problem with one major exception: where is their coldest average? They don't calculate it.
So, if the average temperatures and the peaks don't tell us anything of merit, what can we look at?
In an ideal situation you'd have per-minute (or better!) continuous temperature readings from which you can use calculus to compute the area under the line and determine (approximately) the total heat load of the area being measured. The total load over time will either go up, down, or remain constant. There would be no question as to what was actually happening.
Clearly, we don't have that. However, we can work backward from that. Working back a ways we can get to a few reasonable methods. I'll phrase them as questions:
1. How many days per year had temperatures above X degrees, Y degrees, and Z degrees; same question for the lows?
2. What is the distribution of temperatures by range? This is a bit more statistical than the first one but basically: divide the temperature range into buckets, or "bins" of eg. 5 degrees. Now place the various temperatures in those bins and plot a graph. This is basically the method used in the famous "bell curve" graph.
Here you can divvy it up in many ways. Take all readings for a station in the year and generate the distribution. Do that year over year and you can then chart changes among the buckets. If the notion that the heat load and retention is increasing is true, the graph will shift to the right. If cooling it will shift left.
Now the second one is more difficult but probably more accurate than the first. But we can easily do the first one. The thing is, when we look at "number of days with temperatures above 105,100,95,90,85 and so on overt time for the U.S. stations that are still in their original site classifications the data clearly shows that the number of hot days is decreasing. This means the peak temperatures have been going down in frequency - not increasing. Doing it for the lows shows the same result - which is interesting on its own.
The result is that when you look at heat load/retention using that data, we're cooler now than we used to be. Not cold, just not as hot. The relatively recent past was freaking hot. The "dustbowl" didn't just happen to farm lands - it was hot as hell across the board. Many places during that era consistently recorded temperatures hotter than we've seen in, well, since then. I'm talking 130 degrees hot - and not just in southern deserts in the U.S. but still over a hundred in the great lakes area and even in Alaska. And not just here and there, but for weeks and months on end.
Can you imagine LA, NYC, Seattle and even Dallas or San Antonio sitting in 120+ degrees everyday for several months today? That was the 1930s. With no air conditioning and poorly insulated housing.
Today the disasterbators want to freak out about one or two days of 102 or 105.
Now just because we are cooling doesn't mean we are headed for another ice age (even though we are, eventually, but that is just the cycle) but it does mean that we are not increasing the heat load/content of the planet - or even the country.
And that is just some of the fundamentals. But when the fundamentals not only fail to support but factually counter your claims your claims are not to be trusted. Not that it stops the disasterbators, of course.
You aren't going to persuade me with any arguments by relying on ad hominem and personal attacks. If you had bothered to look at my profile, I've been a paid member of this site for more than seven years. If you read a part of my book you could see that my entire approach to philosophy begins with the individual. I understand what you are saying. I simply disagree with your conclusions and I have cited - and supported - my arguments. If you want to change my mind, you have address my arguments - not simply restate your position. And stay focused. Going off on a diatribe about my implied socialist leanings only further exposes your emotional attachment to your position and your unwillingness to step back and examine your premises. Do you really see reality as clearly as you think?
We disagree. We can either do that in a civil manner or we can resort to ad hominem and descend into thoughtlessness.
I don't advocate for a "devil-may-care" attitude about personal responsibility, no matter what you may think. Your argument just takes the opposite approach of individualism to an extreme I find to be both ridiculous and impractical - as I cite. But neither do I go to the extreme you accuse me of (which is socialism). If you were to put the two of us on a scale from extreme individualism (at one) to socialist collectivism (at ten), you'd be sitting at a zero and I'd be at a three. Don't allow your extremism to characterize everyone who isn't at the same point on the scale as being opponents. I heartily support individualism, but not when taken to the point of anarchy or isolationism.
I never argued that we should bail out stock market investors. You have falsely attributed that argument to me twice now despite my pointed disavowment. My comparison was to two risky situations and emphasized differences due to the source of the risk, the amount of personal responsibility involved, and the repercussions. You chose to conflate those differences and lead you to the conclusion that there is no moral difference between the scenarios. To me, those differences are entirely material to the question at hand and why? Because they tie directly back to personal responsibility.
"You are arguing for natural disasters based on where you live being paid for by others..."
I'll just stop you right there. I advocated for a disaster relief fund. At least in my state, the primary use of that is to respond to natural disasters in order to mitigate damage and help get affected communities back on a path to productivity. You seem to be completely ignoring this part of the argument. Being an expert on flood-control yourself, you know that there is a non-trivial knowledge gap between your experience and that of the common consumer. If you are like the other emergency management professionals I have worked with, you specialized to become an expert in your field so that you could provide that expertise to others (and they in turn specialize in theirs). You know that the common individual has neither the time nor the resources to respond to a disaster scenario with any level of expertise close to what you have. It is only because there is a coordinated government-run response (overseen by competent and knowledgeable individuals such as yourself) that problems get addressed and relief is administered in a timely manner. I call that efficiency but you're welcome to say what you will.
The other part of a disaster relief fund would be for assisting individuals affected by natural disasters to get back into the economy as quickly as possible. This would be an insurance fund where you pay in hoping you never need to take advantage of the fund. I would also point out that I was open to this being either privately-run or publicly run, I simply pointed to the scope of the problem being such that a public-run option was feasible, had precedents, and may provide advantages. But I never extended it any farther or to include any other programs - stock market or otherwise - and I clearly differentiated those based on personal responsibility.
Another clarification: I never argued for a point of no responsibility such as your extreme analogies about walking out into a street blindfolded or intentionally tempting fate by ignoring common safety precautions. Instead of simply asking what kind of personal responsibility I would advocate in such circumstances, you jumped to the assumption of an extreme position on my part. That your assumption was wholly unjustified doesn't reflect on me, it reflects on you.
If you'd like to have a rational discussion, I'm more than able and willing, but it has to start with an assumption of good will on the part of the other participant. Ad hominem and other such personal attacks don't engender such, nor do unfounded assumptions about the other's position or beliefs. When we say to re-examine one's premises, it is as much about how one approaches a conversation as it is about the content of the conversation. You can either assume I'm an addled, unbridled socialist like Fauxcahontas or you can take the more sensible route and simply ask me my personal opinions on a given matter and not read into them any more than what I state.
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