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7.8 Earthquake Rocks Nepal, Hundreds Dead
An anonymous reader writes: Nepal was struck by an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 today, with an epicenter 80 km east of the country's second biggest city, Pokhara. Its effects were also strongly felt in the capital, Kathmandu. Casualty reports conflict, but authorities have indicated at least 500 are dead and many more are feared to be trapped. Nepal has declared a state of emergency for the affected areas, and asked for international humanitarian assistance. India and Pakistan have both offered help. Some Indian cities were affected by the earthquake as well, and there are reports of avalanches on Mt. Everest, which has many climbers at any given time.
this is not nerd or geek news and does not belong on this site. What the fuck I've seen this story on tons of other sites hours ago.
Stay in your lane!!
I'm interested to know whether there was a measurable altitude change in any of the land, and how much of the devastation may have been caused by landslides and/or avalanches.
Pohkara is beautiful with about 400K people living in the area. My thoughts go out to all the people impacted.
Only spent a few weeks in Nepal around Holi time and found the people there to be wonderful, generous, and fun!
I was there upgrading the wifi network infrastructure at a Buddhist Monastery. The monks need their youtube. ;) Worked on my karma at the same time.
Getting help to that part of the country will be difficult.
And India's response was to have them all reboot their computers. :P
Why would God do such a thing to such innocent people? Even if He didn't cause this to happen, why did He allow it to happen? He could have stopped it. But He didn't. Why did He subject, or allow the subjugation, of these people to such a horrific event? Why did he allow bricks to fall on their tender bodies? Why did he allow their homes and livelihood to be ruined? Why? Why would an entity like God, who is Loving, Caring, Just and Benevolent, allow something like this to happen?
To try and bury the Bruce Jenner story.
Don't shoot the messenger.
Looks like at least 8 climbers dead from the avalanches at Everest.
Damn...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Depends even on more on whether "fracking" could be blamed for the disaster...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I hear Bob Seger's on the way.
You can predict earthquakes? Well done. Why don't you sell your method and get rich, and also maybe try being part of humanity? What fucked up ethical system do you have that doesn't start by saying human life is inherently valuable?
I wasn't aware that Nepal was near a tectonic plate boundary. I've heard of earthquakes in Afghanistan, but not Nepal. Wow
Who cares? It's a nasty third world shithole.
Oh, get over yourself.
In a few weeks, we'll typically have a new measurement of earth rotation speed. Large earthquakes that cause landslides under water triggering tsunamis often change the moment of inertia of the earth. This is probably in the same category. Since the mass moves from higher to lower, decreasing the mean radius of the earth, we typically speed up a little bit, from conservation of momentum. Maybe a few microseconds/day (1 part in 1E11 sort of magnitude)
Then, some later time, there will probably be some radar measurement of the area from orbit, and that will answer the question of where the mass was before and is now.
Poor undeveloped country has insufficient building standards for regular predictable natural disaster. People die.
Its not going to affect me, there is nothing I can do to help, and its hardly surprising, so why care? Not news for anyone, let alone nerds.
Empathy is a basic human emotion that refers to the capability to feel for other people. If you don't ever give a crap about anyone else, why should anyone else ever give a crap about you?
And by the way, I'd consider a earthquake capable of unleashing 7.8 Megatons of energy and leveling entire cities to be worthy of my morning news.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Left: must be the global warming, fracking , capitalism and discrimination against everybody by the white men.
Right: fucking godless faggot lovers caused it. Repent, socialists!
That is as much as I expect to hear on this topic.
You can't handle the truth.
But not just to any fly-by-night charity that hits your inbox with graphic pictures. Check them out here.
What fucked up ethical system do you have that doesn't start by saying human life is inherently valuable?
It is we who choose to make human life valuable or not. And there are easy to conceive global collapse scenarios such as a global famine where human life has negative value - each additional mouth to feed takes food from everyone else and causes more suffering.
My view on this is that the economic mechanisms of trade and private ownership of capital have done far more to make human life valuable than any system of ethics. One can say the same of technology progress, particularly in agriculture, transportation, and labor saving devices.
Fascinating
Empathy is a basic human emotion that refers to the capability to feel for other people.
And where should one look for it? On other sites!
Donate what you can to save the needy in this hour of need!
https://life.indiegogo.com/fun...
http://www.globalgiving.org/pr...
. . . it will be blamed, in several posts that are modded to +5, Insightful, on "Barack Obama and his Socialist agenda!1!1!1"
From what I read, their new high rise buildings were fine and the areas that were destroyed were the historic districts.
---------- Open Source is capitalism applied to IP.
If an individual life has negative value, then the total number of lives worth saving is 0, and there's no reason to care whether a particular act causes an increase in suffering or not.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Empathy is a basic human emotion that refers to the capability to feel for other people.
And where should one look for it? On other sites!
Ha! Geeks and nerds should only have empathy for inanimate objects like computers. After all, that's the "matter" part of "news that matters".
If an individual life has negative value, then the total number of lives worth saving is 0, and there's no reason to care whether a particular act causes an increase in suffering or not.
It's a marginal cost. Reducing the number of people can reach a regime where there is a positive value to people once again.
> If you don't ever give a crap about anyone else, why should anyone else ever give a crap about you?
In case you haven't noticed, the world population gives, on average, zero shits about you.
While I (vaguely) understand the notion that you are asserting, if the value of people can fluctuate (that is, human life has no intrinsic value), then what is the value standard in such a marketplace? Gold? dollars?
This also leads to a rather dismal world in which some murders are ok, and some are slightly more ok than others. Of the choices of available dystopias, this one sounds less appealing than average.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Empathy? That is a reason _not_ to read about it and watch the news. The pointless loss and suffering is sickening.
So why is it "news"? To answer my own above rhetorical question - it is disaster porn.
The same reason people gawk at traffic accidents, stopping even after the ambulance is there. The same reason CNN still makes money showing 9/11 or any other disaster over and over.
Of course some disasters are more newsworthy than others. Fresh pictures are vital - if it takes a week for photos to get from a remote area, then too late - stale news.
And earthquakes sell more papers than floods. How many people know that floods in Bangladesh kill more people every year that this earthquake in Nepal. They didn't tell you that? No, all we remember is that building collapse that made better photos, but fewer deaths.
I hope those who can make a difference - nearby Indian and Chinese authorities - can get in fast. Time is everything.
But us? The Red Cross will be calling for donations, but while that might help them prepare for the next disaster, it makes no difference to this one.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/...
Google executive Dan Fredinburg was among 18 people killed on Mount Everest after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake ravaged Nepal on Saturday.
A woman who identified herself as Fredinburg's younger sister, Megan, said on his Instagram page that he had a major head injury after the avalanche triggered by the quake. He didn't survive.
The catastrophic earthquake Saturday killed more than 1,300 people and leveled ancient buildings in the Nepali capital of Kathmandu. The quake was so strong that it also killed people in nearby India, Bangladesh, and Tibet.
Fredinburg â" who was head of privacy for Google X â" survived last year's deadly avalanche on Mount Everest, according to media reports and his Instagram account.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I was just waiting for the Democrat-funded story about how Nepal had been fracking, since from recent stories it's obvious fracking causes all earthquakes, just as any natural temperature variation is actually Global Warming.
But I'm a little confused - why would REPUBLICANS bury a story showing they are in fact more tolerant than you Left Wing Nazis who have renounced Jenner because he's not the "right kind" of trans?
Republicans are like "yep" while you on the left are chanting "BURN THE WITCH"
Japan 2011 was M9.0, Nepal M7.8. Each whole magnitude number is 32x the energy. Japan gets M8s every century and is well prepared for that. The 2011 quake was the 5th largest every in 130 years of seismographs. Japan didn't expect that size of quake was possible and it's tsunami walls weren't tall enough. The Japan quake was three historical faults breaking at once, contributing to its large magnitude. Because a similar multi-quake occurred in Sichuan China recently, seismologists are more concerned about a multi-quake breaking California. Being a poor country, Nepal did not design for even a smaller quake. Routine M5 quakes in California merely crack plaster, but shatter buildings and kill in underdeveloped countries.
While I (vaguely) understand the notion that you are asserting, if the value of people can fluctuate (that is, human life has no intrinsic value), then what is the value standard in such a marketplace? Gold? dollars?
Whatever is traded in the market. I've found that even when there isn't a formal currency of trade (or the currency of trade is woefully inadequate for some reason such as a high rate of inflation or inability to use it for most trade in the market), markets tend to gravitate to a informal standard of trade.
And since human life is rarely traded directly, it is a tenuous connection in the marketplace, say to jobs that risk life and limb or in trade offs (such as where to live or what quality of tool to buy) which impose differing degrees of risk to a person's life.
This also leads to a rather dismal world in which some murders are ok, and some are slightly more ok than others. Of the choices of available dystopias, this one sounds less appealing than average.
It also happens to be the real world. Human life during a famine in Ethiopia is not as valuable as life in normal India (for example, the Thuggee cult, basically a small sect of serial killers, is supposed to have operated with near impunity for many centuries) which is not as valuable as a life in modern Sweden. This is also reflected in how crime is punished or not in these situations.
Ultimately, the poorer and more desperate a part of society is, the cheaper life becomes.
Empathy is a basic human emotion that refers to the capability to feel for other people. If you don't ever give a crap about anyone else, why should anyone else ever give a crap about you?
It's never been a problem before that most of the world doesn't care about me.