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Quake and Tsunami Devastate South Asia
pfb writes "From reuters, 'The world's fifth-largest quake in a century has hit southern Asia, triggering a speeding tsunami that crashed into Sri Lanka and India, drowning hundreds, and swamping tourist islands in Thailand and the Maldives.'"
They probably confused "geek" with "gook".
Well, instead of caring about the thousands of people who have died you seem to think your nationalistic pride is more important. Am I flaming hard enough?
btw, those flames started after some of your countrymen stated that they didn't give a flying fuck because those people were on the other side of the planet.
now, shut up and donate, it's the least (and only thing?) you can do.
Oh quit whining. Our hearts can't bleed for everything.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
and there is more to come.
Quake and Tsunami Devastate South Asia
I thought for a second that Tsunami was another video game and that all the young people of South Asia had become horribly addicted, thereby forcing the local economies to collapse...
Well, I guess this is mother nature's answer to outsourcing... Seriously though, this was really bad timing. There were probably tons of people in beach resorts who were on holiday.
Wow! This would make for some whoopass big wave surfin'!
My heart goes out to those affected but it will only get worse. I looked at the list of major quakes since 1900 and it seemed that almost half were in the last 10 years. Do you think that maybe the Bible is right? What can we do to help those who are affected? What can we do to prepare for ourselves for such events? 72 hour kits are a great way to start.
you're dead inside.
"OK, so 10000 people died. Big fucking deal."
unbelievable.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
1) I am not a US citizen.
2) I don't care about a few hundreds people dying each year from terrorism in my country.
3) I do care about statistically significant threats, such as car accidents and heart desease.
4) I did not object to people who cared because they had a reason to care, such as living in Sri Lanka. I object to people, who live on the other side of the world, have no friends/relatives who are affected, are not affected in any other way, but still act as if they care, because they were conditioned to react that way and because "it's on TV", while not giving a flying shit about real problems, such as (for starters) world hunger.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Well, do I have any reason to expect otherwise? There are more than 6 billion people living on Earth. With that many people, most of whom are not immortal yet, death is to be expected. Several hundreds of thousands of people die every day. Now there are 10000 more. Could you explain, why exactly this is a big deal? Why exactly should we care?
P.S. Of course, it's a big deal to those who losed their loved ones, but let me tell you, I didn't and I bet you didn't too. In fact, assuming about 100 close friends per victim (I am being extremely generous), only about 0.015% of all people on Earth have such personal reason to care.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
blame USA for not signing the kyoto treaty.
USA is responsible for 1/4 of all the greenhouse gases effects but represents only 1/25 of world population.
glaciar ice melting and the increase of water mater is one of the side effects of the global warmming.
Let's be realistic, shall we? All other things equal, a life of a less educated person is worth less than of a more educated one. I am aware that many people were programmed to think otherwise, and there is not much I can do about it (to explain why they are wrong requires personal contact and a few hours of my time), but I hope you are not one of them.
Now if we agree on that one, let's consider who died in this disaster. I must admit that I didn't follow the news very closely, but from what I know about the countries hit most, there are a lot of poor people who live in poor houses, and many of those live near the coasts. Now, my house may be shitty by modern west european standards (all our west european friends were probably too polite to say that), but at least it was built moderately well and won't fall down and bury its inhabitants under the rubble.
I am not saying that those people were somehow less worthy for living in a shitty house, I am just saying that statistically those living there were likely to have shitty education as well. And while I am certainly not saying that there can be no decent people without a quality modern education, I believe that had this disaster occured near Japan or New Zealand, the quality of "human resources" lost would be much higher.
It's hard to quantify, especially when people imply that compassion means "everybody is as valuable as everybody else". But when people with arrow range of interest, with little knowledge of the world behind their village, with oiir understanding of history, humanity place in the universe and stuff like that die, I feel the loss is smaller than it would be if a similar number people in Holland died because their dams didn't stop a tsunami.
I knew perfectly well that that paragraph was provocative, but I see no reason to deny my feelings about that (or lack thereof), even though it wasn't vital to my main arguments (too few people died to care).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Assuming all else is equal, yes. My life (since I don't have a Ph.D. yet) would be worth less.
It's possible to argue for this using a number of rather simple thought experiments, first persuading you that it is possible for two lifes to have different values, second persuading you that generally the better the person is (in any accepted regard), the more valuable his life is to rational people, and third, using this principle in a particular example.
I know from experience that many people have a number of emotional blocks that prevent them from easily accepting this argument. I don't know how simple or difficult would that be for you, though.
Of course, there are lot of side tasks as well, such as defining what "valuable" means, deciding who is qualified to make such decisions, etc.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I just don't understand why is it useful, and why everybody else should care about it.
Nobody has to care about it, it's just a simple explanation of why I am justified in saying "Those 2000 people lived in shitty houses, so it's likely their deaths is no big deal on the planetary scale".
You can play with the logic all day long, but in the end I don't think a significant number of Terrans would say "It'd better we had this earthquake in the North Sea instead so that an equivalent number of Swedes, Brittons and Dutch died".
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.