I'm not applying hindsight to the way the government responded. I'm simply remembering what was immediately obvious within hours and days of the event.
As for the stock market, what I described may be the "nature of how it works" but that doesn't make it less stupid.
You can call it 'perceived' if you like, it's still a reality and has to be counted.
Of course it has to be counted. I'm not trying to argue that it isn't a reality, just that the reality only occurs because things are blown out of proportion. You're clearly arguing that 9/11 is so significant because of the way that people reacted to it, but for some reason, even though that's the argument you keep making, you insist that it isn't what you're saying.
We didn't fail to do that extrapolation with the first world trade center bombing. Everyone knew that there were crosshairs painted on the site. Various security precautions were taken. Military actions occurred, etc. A sense of normalcy returned, people went back to work. Years later, a number of people died. It's still unclear, nearly ten years later, what could have been done to prevent it that wasn't. One key thing that was done was that better evacuation plans were made for the buildings after the debacle of the evacuation in the first bombing.
No. The capacity of both buildings is upwards of 200,000. There were 50,000 at the moment of impact. An hour or so later it would have been closer to 100,000. That's the score Osama was aiming for.
The actual capacity of both buildings is a little hard to find, but there were about 50,000 people employed there. About 150,000 people used the subway stations there each day, maybe that's where you're getting the 200,000 figure, by adding that to the 50,000 who worked there? In any case, an hour later, it might have been closer to 50,000, but at the time of the first impact it was more like 10,000 to 14,000.
I find it odd that you feel the need to keep creeping up the number of potential victims of the attack. A pretty good estimate of how many people died exists. That's the reality of it. Speculating on possible alternate universes where it went down differently doesn't change what actually happened in reality.
These were hijacked planes flown by barely-experienced pilots carrying terrified passengers over a skyscraper-laden city, not state-of-the-art missiles they could fire on a whim. If the second plane had impacted before the first, the 13,000 count could easily have happened only it would have been closer to 25k. It struck the lower quarter of the building. The first happened in the upper floors. The ~3,000 death count is disingenuous when describing what happened on 9-11. We were incredibly lucky.
Once again, the buildings had less than a third of the total number of people they could have had in them at the time. It could have been closer to 25 thousand if it had happened later in the day and the planes had struck at the same time, maybe. Also, the second plane did not strike the lower quarter of the building. It struck pretty much right on the line between the upper quarter and the one below it. The approximate dead center of the second impact was only a few floors lower than the first impact.
Also, the ~3,000 death count is not "disingenuous when describing what happened on 9-11" it's merely descriptive of what actually happened. Are you trying to suggest that ~50,000 people really did die and that I'm trying to somehow deceptively claim that it was only ~3,000?
Because there were 50,000 people in the buildings. The buildings were the target. The people in the buildings were the target. The intent was to destroy the buildings and everybody in them. Car crashes have no such intent *and* since they happen frequently we can measure their averages. Car accidents do not aspire to create more death.
We've previously discussed how a typical two months
We don't know the future, but we can extrapolate based on what we do know. What we knew, even on on the day of the event, is that it was extremely unlikely that another attack like that could be pulled off any time soon, but it was extremely likely that people would keep dying of other known causes at a fairly consistent rate. Most of us with any foresight knew right off the bat that 9/11 was a huge disaster for the US precisely because of the way the country would over-react. No special precognitive abilities were required to know that it would be an excuse to roll out a package of unconstitutional laws, or that the US was going to go to war with someone and spend massive amounts of money that it didn't actually have on it. That the US would push to go to war in Iraq was a no-brainer as well. Anyone with any common sense said that the US would be entangled in Afghanistan for years. People who said a decade or more were laughed at by the people saying it would just be a few months. Anyone with a functioning brain actually understood broadly where history was heading. Also, anyone with a functioning brain understood (and still understands) that the stock markets which are the base of much of the economy are ridiculously unstable and unreliable and that there are more people involved in them operating based on speculation and gaming the system than there are trying to provide solid capital to companies in exchange for a solid stake in that company. So, they understood that the markets, and therefore much of the economy, was about to take a big dive due to the facts that all the rats would desert the sinking ship at the very first sign of water. So, based on that knowledge, they all deserted the sinking ship. Great for them, if they managed to sell high and later buy low. Terrible for the market itself. But, once again, just a feedback loop based on people speculating and predicting how the event would be received and operating in line with those predictions, resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.
In the case of murder, it may be attempted again. What surprises me is how many people forget that the 9/11 was at least the second attempt on the World Trade Center. Destroying them with a bomb had been tried about a decade before. Those behind the attacks (the ones who weren't already dead or whose cover wasn't compromised) certainly could have tried again for a similar sized attack and those who are left or who are their ideological descendants (or indeed completely different groups like say Iraqis or Afghan's who had no connection to the original attacks but who have lost their families to US bombings) still may try again. As you've stated, we're unsure about what the future may hold but, as I've stated, we can fairly reliably extrapolate certain trends. As such, we can be pretty sure that there will be another large terrorist attack someday, but our best guess at the size and frequency of such events puts them way down on the list of causes of death, injury and destruction. Meanwhile, many more people are likely to die from auto accidents and regular, personal murder (many of which are one-offs committed by people who don't actually intend to make a career out of murder).
The World Trade Center towers could hold upwards of 50,000 people, true. The nature of the attacks made it unlikely that the planes could have hit lower than about halfway up, and the fact that the planes hit about 17 minutes apart gave a fair amount of time to evacuate the second tower so (making certain reasonable assumptions about distribution of people within the towers and how speedily the buildings could be evacuated) it's unlikely the attacks, as performed, would have gotten more than 13,000 or so even if the buildings had been filled to capacity when the first plane struck. For that matter, the first strike came before 9:00 AM. A lot of people don't start work until 9:00, so it's unlikely that the buildings were filled to capacity at the time anyway.
You can say what if, and decide that, since fifty thousand _could_, ma
Things like the stock market and the economy are feedback loops that are very, very heavily by perception of reality rather than reality itself. The financial effects of 9/11, aside from the immediate property damage, injury and loss of life (which are comparable to those from auto accidents in a fairly short time frame), are all secondary effects due to the way the incident is perceived, rather than the actual adverse effects. You say that it "scared the **** out of everybody" which is everyone reacting irrationally relative to the actual danger to them. You say that "the economy tanked" which is once again due to people's reaction to the event, rather than the event itself. You say that "travel was severely disrupted" which is due to panic and the CYA principle employed by authorities who were trying to close the gate after the horses had already escaped.
There are differences between people dying by accident and being murdered. The victims are just as dead either way, however. In any case, there were about 16,000 other murders in the US that year, so 9/11 would still just be a statistical blip against that.
You're acting as if this somehow makes the event immeasurably worse.
That's because it was. It took almost two years for the country to recover from what happened on 9-11. The world would have been very different if, for example, 3,000 people had heart attacks across the country.
Yes, the world would have been very different. But saying that it was worse because of how long it took to recover from it (personally, I don't see where you get the two year figure, it seems that the country still hasn't recovered) doesn't work. It's taking so long to recover from it because the response was so disproportionate. The response was disproportionate because the event was perceived as worse, not because it actually was worse than an equivalent number of fatal auto accidents. People who lost loved ones in the 9/11 incident were surely profoundly affected by it, but surely no more so than those who lost loved ones in auto accidents.
Yes, we should respond appropriately to events. Clearly, the US hasn't and has gone completely crazy over one set of deaths for nearly a decade now.
I did not acknowledge that it is worse. I acknowledged that a more concentrated event can overwhelm emergency services.
I know you didn't acknowledge it, you still proved it. That distinction really isn't one. You've shown one way that having it happen at once is worse than having it spread out. That means that this whole 'perception' concept is bunk.
I speculated that one large, concentrated event rather than lots of spread out events could overwhelm emergency services and, in that way, a large concentrated event might be considered worse. You're acting as if this somehow makes the event immeasurably worse. It doesn't. It's fairly straightforward. If emergency services aren't overwhelmed, there may be fewer deaths, fewer injuries, and less property damage. If they are overwhelmed, there may be more. It is not a factor that's separate from the final accounting. If the final tally of death, injury, and destruction is less than the tally for some other cumulative "event", then the latter event is worse regardless of which event got better emergency services coverage. In any case, it's a bit subjective whether overwhelming emergency services actually makes an event worse. On a human scale, it almost certainly does. The kind of cold, pragmatic accounting used, for example, by nations when they decide to go to war, almost certainly prefers people to die at the scene than to require long-term medical care and perhaps require assistance for the rest of their lives.
You're saying a finite event is less than the total of all events throughout eternity.
I'm saying that a finite event is less than the total of all events throughout the kind of time frame you could reasonably expect finite events of that scale to occur. There were more than 42,000 deaths from auto accidents the year that 2752 people died in the World Trade Center collapse. It was about a month's worth of auto accidents. All of those deaths were tragic, but the death of someone who was just working innocently enough in their office isn't somehow more tragic than the death of someone just innocently driving down the road. If an event on the level of 9/11 happened once a month, it would put it on the scale of auto accidents. Both combined would still only be a fraction of the 250,000+ deaths that would be occurring each month. Devoting the kind of money and focus that's been given to 9/11 to almost any other cause of death would almost certainly have better results.
There are all sorts of things we don't know about the future. We don't know that some natural cause of death won't come along tomorrow and wipe us all out. Uncertainty about the future isn't an excuse to act stupidly. All we can do is extrapolate from past events and our best information on the causes of those events and try to apply that knowledge to the information we have about the present. That's all we can ever do. Getting overly worked up over any one thing isn't sensible. I remember when everyone in the US was so incredibly worked up about the Soviet Union and that fear justified tremendous amounts of spending. The USSR is no more, but their nuclear program remains and the US is still in a constant state of being minutes away from nuclear war with Russia. People have just gotten used to it or just plain forgotten about it. Eventually they'll forget about it. In 8 years, there will be an entire generation of US voters starting to reach voting age who weren't even alive when 9/11 happened. Given the slow progress of withdrawing troops, it's looking like it's possible they're going to be wondering why the US is _still_ in an ongoing war over it. They're also going to be pretty angry that they're being stuck with the bill for the last 50 years or so of the bipartisan "borrow and spend" program.
Unless there's some sort of truly huge upswing in terrorist attacks, I don't see how the numbers don't make it more sensible to spend the money on making cars safer, developing alternative energy sources etc. Now, if we did spend the money on making driving safer then "at the end of the universe" there might, maybe, be a slim chance that terrorist attacks caused more death than transportation accidents. That's really a goal we should work towards.
I did not acknowledge that it is worse. I acknowledged that a more concentrated event can overwhelm emergency services. Unless we're willing to spend massive amounts more for emergency services, we're not going to be able to fix that. As concentrated as 9/11 was, the total amount of death and destruction was less than the cumulative effects of auto accidents.
But the original poster wasn't saying "what if all those auto accidents happened at once?", just that the cumulative death, injury and damage was worse. "Chaotic shock" is just a matter of perception. It still seems to me that you're basically just saying that anything that is perceived as worse is actually worse, simply because it's perceived as such.
I know that's what you're saying, but you were claiming that the previous posters comment that the spread out nature of the event diminishes the perceived impact supported your point. I don't see how it does. I suppose if all the crashes happened in one place at the exact same time it might overwhelm local emergency services. Taken the way the poster you replied to actually meant it, however, as simply a comparison of the cumulative death, injury, and property damage of auto accidents versus the 9/11 incidents death injury and property damage, then the auto incidents are clearly worse.
Errr, so you're saying that you never change your oil or waterproof your deck? You just wait for your engine to go and your deck to rot, then fix them?
The problem is the spread-out nature of the event diminishes the perceived impact.
This statement supports my point. If all of the car crashes in the space of a year happened in one day the damage would be greater than it currently is where everything is spread out.
But that's a circular argument. You're saying that more significance should be attached to such events because people perceive them as more significant.
As long as we're talking about oil that isn't attainable with current technology (the quote doesn't actually say how much of that 300 years of demand is technologically unattainable and how much is simply environmentally protected, but I'm guessing there's a lot more that's simply impossible to get without speculative future technology), we might as well talk about other things that aren't attainable with current technology. Instead of those untapped reserves, let's just use fusion reactors or 90% efficient cheap solar panels.
The reasons that it's happening are pretty much all man-made. I'm not going to go into anthropogenic climate change since it's "controversial", but there are other human causes too. What most of the human involvement boils down to is how important drainage is in engineering. Everything we build we plan for the water to flow off to avoid erosion and to stop foundations flooding, etc. We cover lots of land area with roofs, roads, parking lots, etc. and we give them elaborate drainage systems. Where do we send all that water? We send it where it ends up naturally, into the rivers. All fine and natural. Except that it used to get to the rivers through slow underground aquifers, and now we're sending it through all kinds of pipes and channels designed to get it there as quickly and smoothly as possible. So, oops, no more buffer and, as a result floods are bigger when they happen.
Then, of course, there's the flooding problems caused by our flood control measures. Levees stop areas from flooding, sure. In fact, pretty much every time you hear about a levee failing and a massive area being flooded, it's actually a pretty small area compared to the area that would have been flooded if the levees were not there. Of course, floods are three dimensional, so they aren't all about area. The concentrating effects of levees can turn floods that might have made the first floor carpets wet in poorly designed houses over a huge area into devastating events that sweep entire townships away and flood up to the treetops. It's not that flood control can't be done right, it's just that, if you're going to do it, you _have to_ do it right, or you simply make the problem worse.
Pretty much par for the course. What I've never understood is why, once they introduce real world monetary value to the items in online games they don't fall afoul of gambling laws? If ingame items are purchased for real money and can be won from you in game by other players or by "the house" (item is destroyed, thereby "returning" to the game company much like casino chips when you lose). There's practically no online game that's a game of pure skill, they all have some random element that you're gambling on (at least as random as casino slot machines are "random"). So when video game items become markers for real money, why don't the video games become a form of gambling?
I'm wondering if anyone here has ever watched the show _Cops_ where camera crews follow police around and film people being arrested. When the filmed subjects don't give their consent to be on TV afterwards, they blur their faces a little bit, but that's it. I wonder if it's ever been filmed in Massachusetts or one of the other one party recording states and what the police would do if someone who was recorded without wanting to be sued them over it. Would they use the exact same argument about it being done in an environment with no expectation of privacy?
The thing is, when the rest of us make a "split-second decision that in hindsight might have been the wrong one", and our actions due to that decision are, or even might be, against the law, the police are quite ready to arrest us. If you and a friend were both carrying guns, perfectly legally, and were confronted by a tiny woman with a potato peeler and shot her, you'd almost certainly end up doing time for at least manslaughter (maybe not in Texas).
Another market, although admittedly not a big one, could be the space industry. Reprocessing of human waste directly into food has definite applications in long manned space missions. If you had a moon base, for example, this kind of technology could be used to increase the time between resupply missions and potentially could save hundreds of millions of dollars. Not to mention that it might give the moon base occupants some real incentive to get extraterrestrial food gardens up and running as fast as possible.
Of course, neither of those vehicles you mention are doing any damage at all relative to a truck. The fact is that 99% of road damage caused by vehicles is caused by trucks.
Hang on. "Hundreds of Millions of Kilowatts"? As in hundreds of gigawatts? As in more than the residential electrical power usage of the entire United States? As in enough to instantaneously vaporise the blast door they were slowly melting through in Episode One? I think maybe you're exaggerating just a little.
The thing about noise and fiery explosions in space is that, when a spaceship blows up, the area around it isn't empty space anymore. For one thing, when the oxygen tanks blow, you're probably going to get some fire. When a ship blows it's going to send out a shockwave of gas/plasma/particulates. When that hits another ship, the people in the other ship are going to hear it. Of course, in the real world, the sound would probably be much higher pitched. Without blowing up some things in space, in fact, it's going to be very difficult for a poor foley artist to know what an explosion in space will actually sound like, so they fall back on canned explosion sounds.
Bear in mind that movies often skip sensible realism and not just in science fiction movies. When was the last time you saw a "realistic" war movie and complained that the sound of a large explosion occurred simultaneously with the flash even though the vantage point was several seconds away at the speed of sound? How about any movie when there's music coming from somewhere but the characters don't seem to be able to hear it? Or, how about when the character in the movie turns on their car radio and some music starts playing and you know that it's not the movies background music, but then the camera changes and you're looking at the car from a distance, or maybe you're in a different scene altogether, but the music keeps playing uninterrupted?
There was an episode of Babylon 5 that focused on some of the station techs going about their duties while a big space battle is going on outside. There was a bit where they're looking out a window and one comments to the other that when there's an orange flash it's one of theirs blowing up and when there's a blue flash it's one of the raiders because, whatever they are, they don't keep an oxygen atmosphere in their ships.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not applying hindsight to the way the government responded. I'm simply remembering what was immediately obvious within hours and days of the event.
As for the stock market, what I described may be the "nature of how it works" but that doesn't make it less stupid.
Of course it has to be counted. I'm not trying to argue that it isn't a reality, just that the reality only occurs because things are blown out of proportion. You're clearly arguing that 9/11 is so significant because of the way that people reacted to it, but for some reason, even though that's the argument you keep making, you insist that it isn't what you're saying.
We didn't fail to do that extrapolation with the first world trade center bombing. Everyone knew that there were crosshairs painted on the site. Various security precautions were taken. Military actions occurred, etc. A sense of normalcy returned, people went back to work. Years later, a number of people died. It's still unclear, nearly ten years later, what could have been done to prevent it that wasn't. One key thing that was done was that better evacuation plans were made for the buildings after the debacle of the evacuation in the first bombing.
The actual capacity of both buildings is a little hard to find, but there were about 50,000 people employed there. About 150,000 people used the subway stations there each day, maybe that's where you're getting the 200,000 figure, by adding that to the 50,000 who worked there? In any case, an hour later, it might have been closer to 50,000, but at the time of the first impact it was more like 10,000 to 14,000.
I find it odd that you feel the need to keep creeping up the number of potential victims of the attack. A pretty good estimate of how many people died exists. That's the reality of it. Speculating on possible alternate universes where it went down differently doesn't change what actually happened in reality.
Once again, the buildings had less than a third of the total number of people they could have had in them at the time. It could have been closer to 25 thousand if it had happened later in the day and the planes had struck at the same time, maybe. Also, the second plane did not strike the lower quarter of the building. It struck pretty much right on the line between the upper quarter and the one below it. The approximate dead center of the second impact was only a few floors lower than the first impact.
Also, the ~3,000 death count is not "disingenuous when describing what happened on 9-11" it's merely descriptive of what actually happened. Are you trying to suggest that ~50,000 people really did die and that I'm trying to somehow deceptively claim that it was only ~3,000?
We've previously discussed how a typical two months
We don't know the future, but we can extrapolate based on what we do know. What we knew, even on on the day of the event, is that it was extremely unlikely that another attack like that could be pulled off any time soon, but it was extremely likely that people would keep dying of other known causes at a fairly consistent rate. Most of us with any foresight knew right off the bat that 9/11 was a huge disaster for the US precisely because of the way the country would over-react. No special precognitive abilities were required to know that it would be an excuse to roll out a package of unconstitutional laws, or that the US was going to go to war with someone and spend massive amounts of money that it didn't actually have on it. That the US would push to go to war in Iraq was a no-brainer as well. Anyone with any common sense said that the US would be entangled in Afghanistan for years. People who said a decade or more were laughed at by the people saying it would just be a few months. Anyone with a functioning brain actually understood broadly where history was heading. Also, anyone with a functioning brain understood (and still understands) that the stock markets which are the base of much of the economy are ridiculously unstable and unreliable and that there are more people involved in them operating based on speculation and gaming the system than there are trying to provide solid capital to companies in exchange for a solid stake in that company. So, they understood that the markets, and therefore much of the economy, was about to take a big dive due to the facts that all the rats would desert the sinking ship at the very first sign of water. So, based on that knowledge, they all deserted the sinking ship. Great for them, if they managed to sell high and later buy low. Terrible for the market itself. But, once again, just a feedback loop based on people speculating and predicting how the event would be received and operating in line with those predictions, resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.
In the case of murder, it may be attempted again. What surprises me is how many people forget that the 9/11 was at least the second attempt on the World Trade Center. Destroying them with a bomb had been tried about a decade before. Those behind the attacks (the ones who weren't already dead or whose cover wasn't compromised) certainly could have tried again for a similar sized attack and those who are left or who are their ideological descendants (or indeed completely different groups like say Iraqis or Afghan's who had no connection to the original attacks but who have lost their families to US bombings) still may try again. As you've stated, we're unsure about what the future may hold but, as I've stated, we can fairly reliably extrapolate certain trends. As such, we can be pretty sure that there will be another large terrorist attack someday, but our best guess at the size and frequency of such events puts them way down on the list of causes of death, injury and destruction. Meanwhile, many more people are likely to die from auto accidents and regular, personal murder (many of which are one-offs committed by people who don't actually intend to make a career out of murder).
The World Trade Center towers could hold upwards of 50,000 people, true. The nature of the attacks made it unlikely that the planes could have hit lower than about halfway up, and the fact that the planes hit about 17 minutes apart gave a fair amount of time to evacuate the second tower so (making certain reasonable assumptions about distribution of people within the towers and how speedily the buildings could be evacuated) it's unlikely the attacks, as performed, would have gotten more than 13,000 or so even if the buildings had been filled to capacity when the first plane struck. For that matter, the first strike came before 9:00 AM. A lot of people don't start work until 9:00, so it's unlikely that the buildings were filled to capacity at the time anyway.
You can say what if, and decide that, since fifty thousand _could_, ma
Things like the stock market and the economy are feedback loops that are very, very heavily by perception of reality rather than reality itself. The financial effects of 9/11, aside from the immediate property damage, injury and loss of life (which are comparable to those from auto accidents in a fairly short time frame), are all secondary effects due to the way the incident is perceived, rather than the actual adverse effects. You say that it "scared the **** out of everybody" which is everyone reacting irrationally relative to the actual danger to them. You say that "the economy tanked" which is once again due to people's reaction to the event, rather than the event itself. You say that "travel was severely disrupted" which is due to panic and the CYA principle employed by authorities who were trying to close the gate after the horses had already escaped.
There are differences between people dying by accident and being murdered. The victims are just as dead either way, however. In any case, there were about 16,000 other murders in the US that year, so 9/11 would still just be a statistical blip against that.
Yes, the world would have been very different. But saying that it was worse because of how long it took to recover from it (personally, I don't see where you get the two year figure, it seems that the country still hasn't recovered) doesn't work. It's taking so long to recover from it because the response was so disproportionate. The response was disproportionate because the event was perceived as worse, not because it actually was worse than an equivalent number of fatal auto accidents. People who lost loved ones in the 9/11 incident were surely profoundly affected by it, but surely no more so than those who lost loved ones in auto accidents.
Yes, we should respond appropriately to events. Clearly, the US hasn't and has gone completely crazy over one set of deaths for nearly a decade now.
I speculated that one large, concentrated event rather than lots of spread out events could overwhelm emergency services and, in that way, a large concentrated event might be considered worse. You're acting as if this somehow makes the event immeasurably worse. It doesn't. It's fairly straightforward. If emergency services aren't overwhelmed, there may be fewer deaths, fewer injuries, and less property damage. If they are overwhelmed, there may be more. It is not a factor that's separate from the final accounting. If the final tally of death, injury, and destruction is less than the tally for some other cumulative "event", then the latter event is worse regardless of which event got better emergency services coverage. In any case, it's a bit subjective whether overwhelming emergency services actually makes an event worse. On a human scale, it almost certainly does. The kind of cold, pragmatic accounting used, for example, by nations when they decide to go to war, almost certainly prefers people to die at the scene than to require long-term medical care and perhaps require assistance for the rest of their lives.
I'm saying that a finite event is less than the total of all events throughout the kind of time frame you could reasonably expect finite events of that scale to occur. There were more than 42,000 deaths from auto accidents the year that 2752 people died in the World Trade Center collapse. It was about a month's worth of auto accidents. All of those deaths were tragic, but the death of someone who was just working innocently enough in their office isn't somehow more tragic than the death of someone just innocently driving down the road. If an event on the level of 9/11 happened once a month, it would put it on the scale of auto accidents. Both combined would still only be a fraction of the 250,000+ deaths that would be occurring each month. Devoting the kind of money and focus that's been given to 9/11 to almost any other cause of death would almost certainly have better results.
There are all sorts of things we don't know about the future. We don't know that some natural cause of death won't come along tomorrow and wipe us all out. Uncertainty about the future isn't an excuse to act stupidly. All we can do is extrapolate from past events and our best information on the causes of those events and try to apply that knowledge to the information we have about the present. That's all we can ever do. Getting overly worked up over any one thing isn't sensible. I remember when everyone in the US was so incredibly worked up about the Soviet Union and that fear justified tremendous amounts of spending. The USSR is no more, but their nuclear program remains and the US is still in a constant state of being minutes away from nuclear war with Russia. People have just gotten used to it or just plain forgotten about it. Eventually they'll forget about it. In 8 years, there will be an entire generation of US voters starting to reach voting age who weren't even alive when 9/11 happened. Given the slow progress of withdrawing troops, it's looking like it's possible they're going to be wondering why the US is _still_ in an ongoing war over it. They're also going to be pretty angry that they're being stuck with the bill for the last 50 years or so of the bipartisan "borrow and spend" program.
Unless there's some sort of truly huge upswing in terrorist attacks, I don't see how the numbers don't make it more sensible to spend the money on making cars safer, developing alternative energy sources etc. Now, if we did spend the money on making driving safer then "at the end of the universe" there might, maybe, be a slim chance that terrorist attacks caused more death than transportation accidents. That's really a goal we should work towards.
I did not acknowledge that it is worse. I acknowledged that a more concentrated event can overwhelm emergency services. Unless we're willing to spend massive amounts more for emergency services, we're not going to be able to fix that. As concentrated as 9/11 was, the total amount of death and destruction was less than the cumulative effects of auto accidents.
But the original poster wasn't saying "what if all those auto accidents happened at once?", just that the cumulative death, injury and damage was worse. "Chaotic shock" is just a matter of perception. It still seems to me that you're basically just saying that anything that is perceived as worse is actually worse, simply because it's perceived as such.
I know that's what you're saying, but you were claiming that the previous posters comment that the spread out nature of the event diminishes the perceived impact supported your point. I don't see how it does. I suppose if all the crashes happened in one place at the exact same time it might overwhelm local emergency services. Taken the way the poster you replied to actually meant it, however, as simply a comparison of the cumulative death, injury, and property damage of auto accidents versus the 9/11 incidents death injury and property damage, then the auto incidents are clearly worse.
Errr, so you're saying that you never change your oil or waterproof your deck? You just wait for your engine to go and your deck to rot, then fix them?
But that's a circular argument. You're saying that more significance should be attached to such events because people perceive them as more significant.
Sorry, this is obligatory: "Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"
That's how the Gulf War got started.
As long as we're talking about oil that isn't attainable with current technology (the quote doesn't actually say how much of that 300 years of demand is technologically unattainable and how much is simply environmentally protected, but I'm guessing there's a lot more that's simply impossible to get without speculative future technology), we might as well talk about other things that aren't attainable with current technology. Instead of those untapped reserves, let's just use fusion reactors or 90% efficient cheap solar panels.
Very true. All that quick drainage makes floods happen faster too.
If you're going to quote someone's post from another thread, either provide a link or quote more than a single word. In your first question:
You've failed to quote the part of the post where he calls it a war.
The reasons that it's happening are pretty much all man-made. I'm not going to go into anthropogenic climate change since it's "controversial", but there are other human causes too. What most of the human involvement boils down to is how important drainage is in engineering. Everything we build we plan for the water to flow off to avoid erosion and to stop foundations flooding, etc. We cover lots of land area with roofs, roads, parking lots, etc. and we give them elaborate drainage systems. Where do we send all that water? We send it where it ends up naturally, into the rivers. All fine and natural. Except that it used to get to the rivers through slow underground aquifers, and now we're sending it through all kinds of pipes and channels designed to get it there as quickly and smoothly as possible. So, oops, no more buffer and, as a result floods are bigger when they happen.
Then, of course, there's the flooding problems caused by our flood control measures. Levees stop areas from flooding, sure. In fact, pretty much every time you hear about a levee failing and a massive area being flooded, it's actually a pretty small area compared to the area that would have been flooded if the levees were not there. Of course, floods are three dimensional, so they aren't all about area. The concentrating effects of levees can turn floods that might have made the first floor carpets wet in poorly designed houses over a huge area into devastating events that sweep entire townships away and flood up to the treetops. It's not that flood control can't be done right, it's just that, if you're going to do it, you _have to_ do it right, or you simply make the problem worse.
Pretty much par for the course. What I've never understood is why, once they introduce real world monetary value to the items in online games they don't fall afoul of gambling laws? If ingame items are purchased for real money and can be won from you in game by other players or by "the house" (item is destroyed, thereby "returning" to the game company much like casino chips when you lose). There's practically no online game that's a game of pure skill, they all have some random element that you're gambling on (at least as random as casino slot machines are "random"). So when video game items become markers for real money, why don't the video games become a form of gambling?
I'm wondering if anyone here has ever watched the show _Cops_ where camera crews follow police around and film people being arrested. When the filmed subjects don't give their consent to be on TV afterwards, they blur their faces a little bit, but that's it. I wonder if it's ever been filmed in Massachusetts or one of the other one party recording states and what the police would do if someone who was recorded without wanting to be sued them over it. Would they use the exact same argument about it being done in an environment with no expectation of privacy?
The thing is, when the rest of us make a "split-second decision that in hindsight might have been the wrong one", and our actions due to that decision are, or even might be, against the law, the police are quite ready to arrest us. If you and a friend were both carrying guns, perfectly legally, and were confronted by a tiny woman with a potato peeler and shot her, you'd almost certainly end up doing time for at least manslaughter (maybe not in Texas).
Hey! Listen! Listen! Hey! Link! Listen! Listen! Hey!
"be fruitful and multiply" actually does seem to basically equate to "go out and have piles of babies".
Another market, although admittedly not a big one, could be the space industry. Reprocessing of human waste directly into food has definite applications in long manned space missions. If you had a moon base, for example, this kind of technology could be used to increase the time between resupply missions and potentially could save hundreds of millions of dollars. Not to mention that it might give the moon base occupants some real incentive to get extraterrestrial food gardens up and running as fast as possible.
Of course, neither of those vehicles you mention are doing any damage at all relative to a truck. The fact is that 99% of road damage caused by vehicles is caused by trucks.
Hang on. "Hundreds of Millions of Kilowatts"? As in hundreds of gigawatts? As in more than the residential electrical power usage of the entire United States? As in enough to instantaneously vaporise the blast door they were slowly melting through in Episode One? I think maybe you're exaggerating just a little.
The thing about noise and fiery explosions in space is that, when a spaceship blows up, the area around it isn't empty space anymore. For one thing, when the oxygen tanks blow, you're probably going to get some fire. When a ship blows it's going to send out a shockwave of gas/plasma/particulates. When that hits another ship, the people in the other ship are going to hear it. Of course, in the real world, the sound would probably be much higher pitched. Without blowing up some things in space, in fact, it's going to be very difficult for a poor foley artist to know what an explosion in space will actually sound like, so they fall back on canned explosion sounds.
Bear in mind that movies often skip sensible realism and not just in science fiction movies. When was the last time you saw a "realistic" war movie and complained that the sound of a large explosion occurred simultaneously with the flash even though the vantage point was several seconds away at the speed of sound? How about any movie when there's music coming from somewhere but the characters don't seem to be able to hear it? Or, how about when the character in the movie turns on their car radio and some music starts playing and you know that it's not the movies background music, but then the camera changes and you're looking at the car from a distance, or maybe you're in a different scene altogether, but the music keeps playing uninterrupted?
There was an episode of Babylon 5 that focused on some of the station techs going about their duties while a big space battle is going on outside. There was a bit where they're looking out a window and one comments to the other that when there's an orange flash it's one of theirs blowing up and when there's a blue flash it's one of the raiders because, whatever they are, they don't keep an oxygen atmosphere in their ships.