These patents are pretty clear. The villains here are not really Logan, Goessling and Call - they are playing entirely by the rules as our (supposedly representative) government has set them.
The villains are the incompetent schmucks in the Patent Office who should never have allowed these patents (on grounds of obviousness and lack of "genius" as required by law) and - even more so - the greedy schmucks in the US Congress in 1870 who opened the floodgates by removing the requirement for working models, which restricted the patentability of ideas in an extremely useful and equitable way. Back in the day, if you couldn't build a model of it inside a 12inch by 12inch cube, it just wasn't patentable.
But all that aside, here's a question for Logan: When wealthy corporate patent owners shake down small businessmen and individuals, the White House is all in favor of "protecting American innovation". But recently the Obama adminstration has had strong words for "patent trolls" - at odds with Joe Biden's long history of support for absurdly strong intellectual property laws and ever-growing length of monopoly. Do you think your successful efforts to get wealthy zaibatsus like Apple to pay off your small company is the reason for the Obama/Biden White House's sudden and uncharacteristic distaste for so-called "patent trolls?"
Well then, we just have to hold verizon and other participating telcos responsible for viola...
Yeah, aha. Let's hold the techs responsible.. not the people with shiny guns and government badges who told them to do it.
I won't follow immoral, unethical or illegal orders. Neither should you. Neither should they.
As soon as you start believing "oh, the poor techies had wives and world of warcraft habits to support, they are victims too" you become an apologist for evil. When you start opposing the imposition of just punishment upon then, you are a collaborator with evil.
If life's too hard, there is at least one alternative, you know.
As usual, the cheapest and most unsafe design legally allowed will be built. The AP1000 sell sheet brags about the tremendous cost savings incurred by eliminating expensive safety features due to a simpler, better design. GE touted the costs savings of the thinner, less expensive containment vessels in their BWRs (as used at Fukushima) back in the day on the same basis.
Yet, also as usual, it still can't be done profitably without massive taxpayer assistance in the form of loan guarantees, liability limitations in the event of accident, and insurance guarantees, all funded involuntarily by taxpayers who don't want any fission plants anywhere near their homes. Oh, and let's not forget that Bush/Cheney per-kilowatt direct subsidy! I get to pay for something stupid with my taxes, so that Excelon or Enron can then sell it to me! Yay democracy!
However, as you've pointed out this is still much better than all the decaying, minimally maintained fission plants we're running that were designed to wear out at the turn of the century... that the Bush and Obama administrations have been more than willing to relicense. Our strategy with those appears to be "run 'em till they melt down, it won't hurt any rich people!"
We probably could build safe reactors - if our economic system didn't reward cutting costs by cutting corners - but they still wouldn't be profitable without state sponsorship.
For the US classifying stuff as a munition is just a way to control its export, like they did with strong encryption for years.
Yeah, because that totally worked. Thanks to our heroic and ever-vigilant government doing its very best to hamper the free exchange of ideas, nobody outside the USA has ever had strong encryption. I can't tell you how much safer I feel.
Where do you find the actual meaningful difference to be?
Batteries are slightly better in real-world vehicles by any real-world metric, and gasoline is tremendously better by all metrics except pollution, where it's tremendously worse. You cannot drive a hydrogen-powered car across the USA without using more fossil fuels than you would use burning straight gasoline, and that's just a fact. You can't change that fact with your insults and innuendos.
But I think you're being disingenuous; your post ignores nearly everything in my own, completely ignores the context leading to it, and pretends issues like cost of compression and/or refrigeration don't matter. I was replying to someone who asked if squirting hydrogen into an SUV's gasoline engine's intake would be less polluting than running the same vehicle on gasoline. My answer was and is correct in context, but yours is just a sales pitch for some magical form of hydrogen that can be stored under infinite compression without cost - since you claim the volume and temperature of vehicle hydrogen storage simply doesn't matter.
As for sources of numbers, I think I used Drexel University and the US Department of Energy. While I don't have the exact pages I used graven in memory, I can supply you with a link to a chart from the US Energy Information Administration that should be suitable for you and handily proves my point. Note that it includes both energy density by weight and by volume - although it does not include the extremely important (for vehicles) difference in storage requirements for the different fuels charted.
Hydrogen is not a power source, it's an energy storage medium.
You use up power to isolate and store hydrogen (useful amounts of free hydrogen do not occur in nature) and then when you burn the hydrogen you get some of the energy back, with little or no pollution (other than a little water vapor). It's a slightly lossy process, just like any other energy storage method (batteries, water pumped uphill, compressed gas, etc.) and not a very attractive one for most purposes.
Raw hydrogen, being very small and light compared to other atoms, is difficult and costly to store. It migrates through most materials, you have to use exotic sealants and methods. It also has an extremely wide explosive/ignition mix range with air; compared to gasoline almost any concentration of hydrogen will ignite or explode very easily. So hydrogen carrying systems have to be built with a higher level of quality control to achieve the same level of safety as gasoline vehicles, and if you try to burn hydrogen in an engine designed for gasoline it will typically pre-ignite and perform extremely poorly, if it doesn't just blow the intake manifold right off.
Proponents and oil company shills like to brag about its high energy density, purposely misleading the public by calculating energy density per unit mass instead of by unit volume. In the Real World [tm] a vehicle can't carry around an infinitely large hydrogen storage vessel, so energy density per unit volume is what matters when you're talking hydrogen as a vehicle fuel. Here's the numbers:
Cryogenically stored liquid hydrogen = 2,600 Wh/l Hydrogen gas at around 2,000 psi = 405 Wh/l Liquid gasoline at room temperature = 9,000 Wh/l
Any line of reasoning that assumes hydrogen is a power source - rather than just a storage medium with very poor energy density - is unfortunately based on a flawed premise. Regular electric batteries outperform hydrogen rather significantly at pretty much every metric that's important when we're talking about individually piloted vehicles.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
No problem. The benefit of using Debian/HURD is that you can find out for yourself what the differences are between a microkernel architecture (made useable by a sea of modules) and a monolithic kernel (that has evolved into a sea of modules) - instead of relying on Internet trash talk.
I don't claim to be a prose author of any note; sorry if I'm difficult to follow.
#1) REGARDLESS of whether you evacuate, if your house is destroyed, no public money should be used to rebuild your house in a disaster prone area. I feel sad about the people who lose their lives and property in such places and I will gladly contribute for their relocation but not for rebuilding. Christie just announced $150,000 tax-funded rebuilding grants for Sandy victims (who are well-off enough to own beach property, so given Christie's budgets and actions he literally cares more about funding for wealthy fools than for children's education or vital public services). That is some pandering bullshit if you ask me.
#2) IF YOU CHOOSE to build and rebuild in a disaster prone area, with your own money, nobody should force (or prevent) your evacuation, although not one thin dime should be spent on helping or hindering you. Let the brave and/or strong and/or foolish live their lives as far as they can do it by themselves. But those who DO evacuate are frankly just plain stupid if they can't afford to constantly rebuild with their own resources and they refuse to move away permanently from disaster-prone areas.
#3) ANYONE who is afraid of hurricanes, housefires, terrorists, or invisible sky men, and isn't at least equally afraid of driving a car every day (which is almost certainly a far greater risk in real life) is a fool who does not understand probability. And, probably also a coward who is unreasonably afraid of dying - we all die, it's nothing to fear! Live life instead of running from death. I wasn't the only person out body-surfing during the height of Hurricane Bonnie (which was a very unimpressive hurricane, despite all the evacuation hype at the time) and we all found it exhilarating not terrorizing. Choose life, accept death, face fear, or move the hell inland.
#4) Personally, I do not evacuate, and I have been in several hurricanes, so I think I have to right to say that in my experience the best place to be is where you can actually do things (like put out fires, turn off forgotten gas valves, patch wind-torn holes, etc.) instead of drinking tea in a shelter while your property is destroyed. Again, if you aren't physically or mentally tough enough to live where you are, evacuate permanently - it's not shameful or cowardly it's wise.
But look: Sane people don't change their minds due to an internet conversation unless presented with new information that invalidates something they thought was true, or illuminates something they did not know. You and I are not giving each other new information, we're just endlessly reiterating our same points, so I think we can stop now. You're not going to suddenly grow a pair and refuse to evacuate, and I'm not going to suddenly regain my sanity and evacuate (I hope you see what I did there) so let's let it rest.
Help out the content search engines, man? Always and only use the word "virii" when you are talking about the plural of a computer virus. In the English language, the correct plural form of a biological virus is "viruses".
It's bad enough that the singular form is ambiguous out of context, at least help us build a useful signifier in the plural form.
I think bullets and casings contain enough metal to set off most metal detectors anyways, though I'm already envisioning ways to bypass that.
There may be a way (composite round/casing), but you're going to be hard pressed to make firearm ammo that can bypass the scrutiny of trained gunpowder-sniffing dogs.
Paper cartridges with ceramic or stone payloads dipped twice in a clean hard wax doped with a little lavender oil ought to do the trick. You might have to press them in a mold after the second dip in order to get enough regularity for automatic feed, though, and you'd have to have something close to a clean room set up....
What? I thought you'd made it clear you don't care about costs - rebuilding the rich man's beach house at taxpayer expense over and over again is what I'm arguing against.
I'm not the one forcing cost and risk on others here - I already volunteered to go down with the ship. Please don't "rescue" me and don't try to claim I'll change my tune when the water rises - I've been through several hurricanes already, and I don't evacuate or call for taxpayer help, I get in there and do stuff.
Replying to myself - I just looked back at this thread and realized my earlier repeated reference to "sin taxes" and "punitive taxation" make my last post mostly incoherent. Entirely my own fault. Apologies for the lack of syntactic rigor, and I hope something valid made it out of my perl-addled brain regardless.
Well sure, and that would probably be a good way to sell it. But taxation isn't punishment, and tax abatement is not reward, unless you subscribe to the theory that taxation is legalized theft, which I personally do not.
From my point of view, setting the base tax rate purposely higher than necessary to fund good government and then "rewarding" people with tax abatement means having a fake base tax rate, which is dishonest and mathematically difficult to budget. The base tax rate should be what regular citizens who are doing things right will be paying - otherwise you're explicitly labeling the default citizen as someone being "punished" (apologies for extending your metaphor).
If your house is in an area blackened by recurring fires, and you think it's reasonable for you to evacuate when one's expected and then receive government assistance to rebuild in the same damn place when it burns down, then you and I are talking about the same things and we're having a conversation.
Otherwise, not; we're just talking past each other.
That being said, the best thing to do if your house catches fire is put it out.
Relative to what, the heat-death of the universe? Here on Earth, there are remarkably many buildings that are far older than any living human. My own house is over 170 years old, and my sister lives in a 600 year old house in England that isn't going anywhere in our lifetimes. If you are trying to claim that there is no better place to put the people who lose their homes in hurricanes, and that we have no other option but to rebuild their homes where we know they will be again destroyed, I'll remain unconvinced.
And I think you're still missing my point, anyway. I didn't evacuate when the water was up three feet high on my property; in fact I waded out into the hurricane waters at midnight and turned off the valves on a pair of 500 lb propane tanks that were in danger of washing away. Because I like the place I live, even though it isn't a fancy beach property, so I won't evacuate until there isn't a stone left standing.
So, if you insist on living inside an active volcano, hey, more power to you. Just don't expect anyone else to help you rebuild your fortress of solitude after it burns up, and do expect me to scoff mildly at your lack of commitment if you flee from an impending eruption. And remember it's not the job of the government to financially support insane lifestyle decisions, like rebuilding on a site empirically proven to be unsafe.
That doesn't actually have anything to do with what I said, eh?
If your house gets wiped out once, that's very sad. Let's all chip in to put you some other place. If you insist on staying, you should be on your own - it's disgusting when society encourages people to be craven parasites.
I live on the banks of a small stream, in a 170+ year old former water-powered factory, so I am forced to pay Federal Flood Insurance. It'll never pay out - my money will go to rebuild the homes of people far wealthier than me, who can afford to live on hurricane-swept beaches and barrier islands.
If I had the money for beach property, or chose to live on a barrier island, I would not evacuate. If you can't face real life in the place you live, you should move. Note, though, I personally am all in favor of tax funded assistance for your relocation; it seems like the neighborly thing for the rest of us to contribute, especially since it's not always obvious where natural disasters will strike.
This "run away with your tail tucked between your legs and collect massive federal assistance to rebuild in the same spot" behavior is bad for everyone involved.
Short term, you're absolutely right. But look at the bigger picture and you'll see why punitive taxation is at least nominally and psychologically better... taking the "easy sell" of a tax break is dividing and harming us.
Country A has a tax rate of 90%, but you can get up to 60% of that money back if you slavishly conform to a career politician's idea of how you should best behave. Diversity is bad!
Country B has a tax rate of 30%, but if you indulge in activities scientifically shown to harm large numbers of people you may have to pay additional penalties of up to 60%, in order to finance your right to dissent. Diversity is good!
Which country do productive, inventive people want to live in? They want to live in country B, and pay an extra ten dollars a year to smoke the occasional cigar, or an extra two grand to have a totally impractical car. A country where people pay their way, and are proud of it - a place where you want to be productive, so you have cash to spend on fine cigars and nitro-burning funny cars. It's psychologically the difference between saying "these people don't have to pay as much because they pander to others' ideas of right and wrong" and "these people choose to pay more, to exercise a controversial freedom." Opposite means to achieve the same end - and for Americans, at least, it's saying "anti-vaxxers should put their money where theyir mouths are - if they believe in it, pay for it!" which I think is a very American traditional attitude.
I swear, the way things are going, I expect people to start living on platforms suspended over active volcanoes and demanding taxpayer dollars for their air conditioning costs.
If you live somewhere that nature has decided is no longer going to be habitable by humans, get out or go down with the damn ship but either way do not expect anyone to help you rebuild in the same place. The most the taxpayer should be on the hook for is helping you relocate, which is generous enough. Evacuate permanently, or not at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that, very informative.
These patents are pretty clear. The villains here are not really Logan, Goessling and Call - they are playing entirely by the rules as our (supposedly representative) government has set them.
The villains are the incompetent schmucks in the Patent Office who should never have allowed these patents (on grounds of obviousness and lack of "genius" as required by law) and - even more so - the greedy schmucks in the US Congress in 1870 who opened the floodgates by removing the requirement for working models, which restricted the patentability of ideas in an extremely useful and equitable way. Back in the day, if you couldn't build a model of it inside a 12inch by 12inch cube, it just wasn't patentable.
But all that aside, here's a question for Logan: When wealthy corporate patent owners shake down small businessmen and individuals, the White House is all in favor of "protecting American innovation". But recently the Obama adminstration has had strong words for "patent trolls" - at odds with Joe Biden's long history of support for absurdly strong intellectual property laws and ever-growing length of monopoly. Do you think your successful efforts to get wealthy zaibatsus like Apple to pay off your small company is the reason for the Obama/Biden White House's sudden and uncharacteristic distaste for so-called "patent trolls?"
I won't follow immoral, unethical or illegal orders. Neither should you. Neither should they.
As soon as you start believing "oh, the poor techies had wives and world of warcraft habits to support, they are victims too" you become an apologist for evil. When you start opposing the imposition of just punishment upon then, you are a collaborator with evil.
If life's too hard, there is at least one alternative, you know.
Misattribution is fraud.
Wimp. Start out with hamburgers, add the soda and fries once you've got that down, and you'll be juggling chainsaws on the Interstate in no time!
As usual, the cheapest and most unsafe design legally allowed will be built. The AP1000 sell sheet brags about the tremendous cost savings incurred by eliminating expensive safety features due to a simpler, better design. GE touted the costs savings of the thinner, less expensive containment vessels in their BWRs (as used at Fukushima) back in the day on the same basis.
Yet, also as usual, it still can't be done profitably without massive taxpayer assistance in the form of loan guarantees, liability limitations in the event of accident, and insurance guarantees, all funded involuntarily by taxpayers who don't want any fission plants anywhere near their homes. Oh, and let's not forget that Bush/Cheney per-kilowatt direct subsidy! I get to pay for something stupid with my taxes, so that Excelon or Enron can then sell it to me! Yay democracy!
However, as you've pointed out this is still much better than all the decaying, minimally maintained fission plants we're running that were designed to wear out at the turn of the century... that the Bush and Obama administrations have been more than willing to relicense. Our strategy with those appears to be "run 'em till they melt down, it won't hurt any rich people!"
We probably could build safe reactors - if our economic system didn't reward cutting costs by cutting corners - but they still wouldn't be profitable without state sponsorship.
Because if you don't, the terrorists win. Why do you hate America?
Yeah, because that totally worked. Thanks to our heroic and ever-vigilant government doing its very best to hamper the free exchange of ideas, nobody outside the USA has ever had strong encryption. I can't tell you how much safer I feel.
Batteries are slightly better in real-world vehicles by any real-world metric, and gasoline is tremendously better by all metrics except pollution, where it's tremendously worse. You cannot drive a hydrogen-powered car across the USA without using more fossil fuels than you would use burning straight gasoline, and that's just a fact. You can't change that fact with your insults and innuendos.
But I think you're being disingenuous; your post ignores nearly everything in my own, completely ignores the context leading to it, and pretends issues like cost of compression and/or refrigeration don't matter. I was replying to someone who asked if squirting hydrogen into an SUV's gasoline engine's intake would be less polluting than running the same vehicle on gasoline. My answer was and is correct in context, but yours is just a sales pitch for some magical form of hydrogen that can be stored under infinite compression without cost - since you claim the volume and temperature of vehicle hydrogen storage simply doesn't matter.
As for sources of numbers, I think I used Drexel University and the US Department of Energy. While I don't have the exact pages I used graven in memory, I can supply you with a link to a chart from the US Energy Information Administration that should be suitable for you and handily proves my point. Note that it includes both energy density by weight and by volume - although it does not include the extremely important (for vehicles) difference in storage requirements for the different fuels charted.
Hydrogen is not a power source, it's an energy storage medium.
You use up power to isolate and store hydrogen (useful amounts of free hydrogen do not occur in nature) and then when you burn the hydrogen you get some of the energy back, with little or no pollution (other than a little water vapor). It's a slightly lossy process, just like any other energy storage method (batteries, water pumped uphill, compressed gas, etc.) and not a very attractive one for most purposes.
Raw hydrogen, being very small and light compared to other atoms, is difficult and costly to store. It migrates through most materials, you have to use exotic sealants and methods. It also has an extremely wide explosive/ignition mix range with air; compared to gasoline almost any concentration of hydrogen will ignite or explode very easily. So hydrogen carrying systems have to be built with a higher level of quality control to achieve the same level of safety as gasoline vehicles, and if you try to burn hydrogen in an engine designed for gasoline it will typically pre-ignite and perform extremely poorly, if it doesn't just blow the intake manifold right off.
Proponents and oil company shills like to brag about its high energy density, purposely misleading the public by calculating energy density per unit mass instead of by unit volume. In the Real World [tm] a vehicle can't carry around an infinitely large hydrogen storage vessel, so energy density per unit volume is what matters when you're talking hydrogen as a vehicle fuel. Here's the numbers:
Cryogenically stored liquid hydrogen = 2,600 Wh/l
Hydrogen gas at around 2,000 psi = 405 Wh/l
Liquid gasoline at room temperature = 9,000 Wh/l
Any line of reasoning that assumes hydrogen is a power source - rather than just a storage medium with very poor energy density - is unfortunately based on a flawed premise. Regular electric batteries outperform hydrogen rather significantly at pretty much every metric that's important when we're talking about individually piloted vehicles.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
--Robert A. Heinlein, Life-Line (1939)
I don't know why you're bringing Moist into this. He's not really a super-villain, and I don't need that we need anything dampened, or... made soggy.
No problem. The benefit of using Debian/HURD is that you can find out for yourself what the differences are between a microkernel architecture (made useable by a sea of modules) and a monolithic kernel (that has evolved into a sea of modules) - instead of relying on Internet trash talk.
I don't claim to be a prose author of any note; sorry if I'm difficult to follow.
#1) REGARDLESS of whether you evacuate, if your house is destroyed, no public money should be used to rebuild your house in a disaster prone area. I feel sad about the people who lose their lives and property in such places and I will gladly contribute for their relocation but not for rebuilding. Christie just announced $150,000 tax-funded rebuilding grants for Sandy victims (who are well-off enough to own beach property, so given Christie's budgets and actions he literally cares more about funding for wealthy fools than for children's education or vital public services). That is some pandering bullshit if you ask me.
#2) IF YOU CHOOSE to build and rebuild in a disaster prone area, with your own money, nobody should force (or prevent) your evacuation, although not one thin dime should be spent on helping or hindering you. Let the brave and/or strong and/or foolish live their lives as far as they can do it by themselves. But those who DO evacuate are frankly just plain stupid if they can't afford to constantly rebuild with their own resources and they refuse to move away permanently from disaster-prone areas.
#3) ANYONE who is afraid of hurricanes, housefires, terrorists, or invisible sky men, and isn't at least equally afraid of driving a car every day (which is almost certainly a far greater risk in real life) is a fool who does not understand probability. And, probably also a coward who is unreasonably afraid of dying - we all die, it's nothing to fear! Live life instead of running from death. I wasn't the only person out body-surfing during the height of Hurricane Bonnie (which was a very unimpressive hurricane, despite all the evacuation hype at the time) and we all found it exhilarating not terrorizing. Choose life, accept death, face fear, or move the hell inland.
#4) Personally, I do not evacuate, and I have been in several hurricanes, so I think I have to right to say that in my experience the best place to be is where you can actually do things (like put out fires, turn off forgotten gas valves, patch wind-torn holes, etc.) instead of drinking tea in a shelter while your property is destroyed. Again, if you aren't physically or mentally tough enough to live where you are, evacuate permanently - it's not shameful or cowardly it's wise.
But look: Sane people don't change their minds due to an internet conversation unless presented with new information that invalidates something they thought was true, or illuminates something they did not know. You and I are not giving each other new information, we're just endlessly reiterating our same points, so I think we can stop now. You're not going to suddenly grow a pair and refuse to evacuate, and I'm not going to suddenly regain my sanity and evacuate (I hope you see what I did there) so let's let it rest.
Nah, they've been around longer than metal cartridges. Stone ammo is similarly ancient.
https://www.google.com/search?q=paper+cartridges&tbm=isch
Help out the content search engines, man? Always and only use the word "virii" when you are talking about the plural of a computer virus. In the English language, the correct plural form of a biological virus is "viruses".
It's bad enough that the singular form is ambiguous out of context, at least help us build a useful signifier in the plural form.
Paper cartridges with ceramic or stone payloads dipped twice in a clean hard wax doped with a little lavender oil ought to do the trick. You might have to press them in a mold after the second dip in order to get enough regularity for automatic feed, though, and you'd have to have something close to a clean room set up....
What? I thought you'd made it clear you don't care about costs - rebuilding the rich man's beach house at taxpayer expense over and over again is what I'm arguing against.
I'm not the one forcing cost and risk on others here - I already volunteered to go down with the ship. Please don't "rescue" me and don't try to claim I'll change my tune when the water rises - I've been through several hurricanes already, and I don't evacuate or call for taxpayer help, I get in there and do stuff.
I'm American, in case you couldn't tell. ;)
Replying to myself - I just looked back at this thread and realized my earlier repeated reference to "sin taxes" and "punitive taxation" make my last post mostly incoherent. Entirely my own fault. Apologies for the lack of syntactic rigor, and I hope something valid made it out of my perl-addled brain regardless.
Well sure, and that would probably be a good way to sell it. But taxation isn't punishment, and tax abatement is not reward, unless you subscribe to the theory that taxation is legalized theft, which I personally do not.
From my point of view, setting the base tax rate purposely higher than necessary to fund good government and then "rewarding" people with tax abatement means having a fake base tax rate, which is dishonest and mathematically difficult to budget. The base tax rate should be what regular citizens who are doing things right will be paying - otherwise you're explicitly labeling the default citizen as someone being "punished" (apologies for extending your metaphor).
If your house is in an area blackened by recurring fires, and you think it's reasonable for you to evacuate when one's expected and then receive government assistance to rebuild in the same damn place when it burns down, then you and I are talking about the same things and we're having a conversation.
Otherwise, not; we're just talking past each other.
That being said, the best thing to do if your house catches fire is put it out.
Relative to what, the heat-death of the universe? Here on Earth, there are remarkably many buildings that are far older than any living human. My own house is over 170 years old, and my sister lives in a 600 year old house in England that isn't going anywhere in our lifetimes. If you are trying to claim that there is no better place to put the people who lose their homes in hurricanes, and that we have no other option but to rebuild their homes where we know they will be again destroyed, I'll remain unconvinced.
And I think you're still missing my point, anyway. I didn't evacuate when the water was up three feet high on my property; in fact I waded out into the hurricane waters at midnight and turned off the valves on a pair of 500 lb propane tanks that were in danger of washing away. Because I like the place I live, even though it isn't a fancy beach property, so I won't evacuate until there isn't a stone left standing.
So, if you insist on living inside an active volcano, hey, more power to you. Just don't expect anyone else to help you rebuild your fortress of solitude after it burns up, and do expect me to scoff mildly at your lack of commitment if you flee from an impending eruption. And remember it's not the job of the government to financially support insane lifestyle decisions, like rebuilding on a site empirically proven to be unsafe.
That doesn't actually have anything to do with what I said, eh?
If your house gets wiped out once, that's very sad. Let's all chip in to put you some other place. If you insist on staying, you should be on your own - it's disgusting when society encourages people to be craven parasites.
I live on the banks of a small stream, in a 170+ year old former water-powered factory, so I am forced to pay Federal Flood Insurance. It'll never pay out - my money will go to rebuild the homes of people far wealthier than me, who can afford to live on hurricane-swept beaches and barrier islands.
If I had the money for beach property, or chose to live on a barrier island, I would not evacuate. If you can't face real life in the place you live, you should move. Note, though, I personally am all in favor of tax funded assistance for your relocation; it seems like the neighborly thing for the rest of us to contribute, especially since it's not always obvious where natural disasters will strike.
This "run away with your tail tucked between your legs and collect massive federal assistance to rebuild in the same spot" behavior is bad for everyone involved.
Short term, you're absolutely right. But look at the bigger picture and you'll see why punitive taxation is at least nominally and psychologically better... taking the "easy sell" of a tax break is dividing and harming us.
Country A has a tax rate of 90%, but you can get up to 60% of that money back if you slavishly conform to a career politician's idea of how you should best behave. Diversity is bad!
Country B has a tax rate of 30%, but if you indulge in activities scientifically shown to harm large numbers of people you may have to pay additional penalties of up to 60%, in order to finance your right to dissent. Diversity is good!
Which country do productive, inventive people want to live in? They want to live in country B, and pay an extra ten dollars a year to smoke the occasional cigar, or an extra two grand to have a totally impractical car. A country where people pay their way, and are proud of it - a place where you want to be productive, so you have cash to spend on fine cigars and nitro-burning funny cars. It's psychologically the difference between saying "these people don't have to pay as much because they pander to others' ideas of right and wrong" and "these people choose to pay more, to exercise a controversial freedom." Opposite means to achieve the same end - and for Americans, at least, it's saying "anti-vaxxers should put their money where theyir mouths are - if they believe in it, pay for it!" which I think is a very American traditional attitude.
I swear, the way things are going, I expect people to start living on platforms suspended over active volcanoes and demanding taxpayer dollars for their air conditioning costs.
If you live somewhere that nature has decided is no longer going to be habitable by humans, get out or go down with the damn ship but either way do not expect anyone to help you rebuild in the same place. The most the taxpayer should be on the hook for is helping you relocate, which is generous enough. Evacuate permanently, or not at all.