ScienceNostalgia101

Who's going to impose those regulations on California, then? I don't think the farmers are dim, but I do think their customers are somewhat in denial about how much of a burden getting this stuff from California places on the environment. If it were that they didn't care at all, they wouldn't even bother to tell Californians to stop watering their lawns or stuff like that.

My personal experience is primarily with Canada, but seeing as how personal experiences cannot be proven online, they should have no bearing on the perceived value of my reasoning. I cannot offer a precise estimate on the return on investment per annum. But a society as densely populated as Hong Kong's takes a lot of ingenuity to maintain. The next-most-comparably-expensive cities are also densely populated. If we could import that ingenuity, intelligence, and work ethic, it would be shocking if it didn't eventually pay for itself.

I would recommend watching any potential source of spontaneous sincerity like a hawk; whether through Internet culture or otherwise; to circumvent people's tendency to lie, and, keeping all plausible interpretations of what one observed in mind, use evolutionary reasoning to narrow down the interpretations as best as possible. Would that still be open to interpretation? Sure. But so is "3 separate photographs of 3 separate crowds of Trump supporters, any of which might be doing this in a district that was known to have voted Trump last election, and none of which have any reason to believe that this would make Biden let his guard down as easily as lying to a pollster did for Clinton in 2016."

If you took a close look at Internet culture in 2016, Trump's victory would not have come as a shock. Internet culture was awash in Muslim-bashing and Mexican-bashing as far as the eye could see. You know, the kind of stuff people would conceal if asked about it by a pollster. People focus on individual polls' "methodology" but ignore the fact that the 2016 US polls, just like the 2013 British Columbia polls, asked people their opinions and expected an honest answer, to predictable results.

The "trading partner" that had been selling Americans a lot of defective, lead-painted junk? The USA needs new trading partners ASAP anyway. The return on investment comes from the productivity Hong Kongers have already demonstrated making their unique city-state work. (That is, until it was pulled from beneath their feet by mainland China.) If there's more where that from, then perhaps the USA stands to benefit more from this than said Kong Kongers themselves. Who better to figure out how to fix the healthcare system and infrastructure than people who handled coronavirus better than Americans did, and built better infrastructure?

I don't recall how long it took to find the one on blizzards, but I wasn't expecting to find it quickly, hence posting the NWS one first and the other one later. The relevant point for the purposes of California is that people choose to live there, threats to life safety be damned, even if it means growing; as you put it, rice, alfalfa, and almonds there; instead of in more suitable states for growing them. As if on cue, Cracked.com has recently mentioned another solution for disaster-prone regions: So you have these homes on top of support beams such that floods don't actually enter and water-damage the home. Not only did buyers reject them, so in a way so did voters by not, let's say, subsidizing them through taxes on non-dome-homes, so that people who want to assume the risk by buying a more "normal" looking home at least have to pay up front for the tax dollars that would be sent their way once the flood hit.

Your own source says "in sprawling communities designed for the automobile." In other words, if we could significantly cut down on automobile use, it would be safer for cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists alike by having fewer vehicles on the road. The only question is how to get there in a way with the minimal amount of harm to pedestrians and cyclists. I would think knowing that one's son or daughter is out there would incentivize voters to push for more protected bike paths and a crackdown on reckless drivers, wouldn't you say?

I'm pretty sure anyone really committed to figuring out people's real opinions from online comments wouldn't so easily mistake an individual for the crowd. Especially someone who doesn't claim to speak for everyone... and on occasion, actively claims not to. To whatever extent phone polls can be blamed for getting 2016 wrong, that leaves behind the question of why pollsters didn't bother to find better sampling methods. Could it be that, deep down, no matter how strong their sample, they have no way of predicting an imbalance between people who tell one lie and people who tell the opposite?

I was proposing a means to make bicycling to and/or from school safe even in unsafe neighbourhoods. I brought up that if these neighbourhoods are infested enough with people reprehensible enough to abduct or severely harm a child who was trying to do right by the environment we could up the ante to combat this, and in the process make the neighbourhoods safer by ridding the world of such people. We can't just retreat to our cars because the streets are unsafe. Driving is unsafe anyway. Make the streets safe. Nothing less will do.

Perhaps I am. I don't trust the social sciences anyway after they vouched for the idea of believing respondents.

I looked into NWS statistics on this years ago for a project for school. Why else did you think I recalled where to find them so quickly? In California's case in particular the risk is for less reason. The quasi-Mediterranean climate does not lend itself to farming as well as the deep south's humid subtropical climate does. Hence more water use for irrigation than other uses and all the "who will farm our crops" responses one typically hears when people ask why southerners stay in the south. As well, Californians, to evacuate their wildfires, get on the road to get out of the way, and this releases CO2 into the atmosphere; as does the forest fire itself. (A squandered opportunity, I might add, to figure out how to design infrastructure that could harness the immense energy released by these fires.) This is a ticking time bomb for worse casualties if the next wildfire corresponds with, let's say, a traffic jam along an evacuation route. New Englanders could survive their blizzards the same way everyone else could've survived a pandemic; by staying home; if they were willing to and their employers would let them.

As I've mentioned before, Winnipeggers manage to bicycle during wind chill far worse than Manhattan's. It's all a matter of learning to dress for the cold. Of course, this doesn't necessarily necessitate doing away with school buses altogether; just using them more sparingly and having school-bus-days just as one has snow days. French is one of those courses students complain about a lot, and in a world with translation apps it's not taken out of "necessity." That suggests that a lot of students hate physical education enough that even French is better in their eyes. When I bring up the unfalsifiability of deterrence, I am referring to the tarnished credibility of those who invoke it. They do not value falsifiability as much as they claim or they wouldn't be (for the most part) making unfalsifiable claims about how "bloodthirsty" or whatever the average death penalty advocate "really" is. That suggests the case against the death penalty is steeped in hypocrisy, reflecting poorly on said opposition, (they don't propose boycotting China over its travelling execution vans either) even if a few of the individuals against it might happen to be honest people.

Well, I'm going by stats from the NWS themselves. Certainly the USA is getting better at saving people from warm-weather-related disasters than they used to be, while "winter" and "cold" seem to give conflicting results, but overall the ones related to warm weather (lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, and heat) are still generally more severe. Floods could happen in just about any state, but I would presume warmer weather, associated with higher water vapour concentrations (unless one's in the desert) would in turn carry worse potential for heavier rain and more severe flooding. But even apart from flooding, warm-weather disasters are associated with more casualties than cold-weather ones. Which makes sense; you can stay home and wear a coat during a blizzard. I can't think of anything one could wear during a tornado at home that would help you survive. Air pillows may help with the initial impact, but they won't help you find your way out of the debris. Objection, your honour, that question assumes facts not in evidence. https://www.riskmanagementmonitor.com/flurry-down-economics-the-real-cost-of-blizzards/ Not sure why sources differ on whether severe thunderstorms or winter storms are more deadly, but even sources claiming winter storms to be deadlier still claim them to be less destructive. This makes reasonable sense; there are more ways to at least somewhat improve your odds of surviving an EF5 tornado than to prevent your house from being damaged by one. What, might I ask, were you expecting? For me to have jumped into this topic without ever having looked into this before in my life?

You mean like it was in 2016? Look, respondents lie, so polling is right out. Internet comments at least offer a sliver of a chance at spontaneous sincerity. I'm not sure if it's the best option, but it can't be worse than polling. Nothing can. Frankly, calling polls scientific is a little too strong a word. If an engineer got it wrong and people died there'd be hell to pay. But polling got it wrong in a manner associated with hundreds of thousands of deaths; more than any engineering failure was ever associated with; at the hands of the person who actually won that election, with no way of knowing if he'd have won if his rivals didn't let their guard down, and yet people still rely on polling. As for those continuing to strawman my post as calling for the outright banning of cars, please re-read this.

What if the "assistance" is counterproductive? What if the country that is "assisted" only screws things up anyway? (Masks sent to Wuhan failing to prevent coronavirus from spreading to the rest of the world come to mind.) No one can protect the entire world, that's why we have borders in the first place. So, regarding, zapatos' earlier point, the question then becomes whether those "building permits" are biased toward disaster-proneness as perceived by the voters, instead of disaster-proneness in and of itself. Seeing as how the public often compares New England's blizzards to the west coast's fires and deep south's hurricanes and heat waves, depsite blizzards being less costly or deadly (especially if you stay home) I would think there is some sort of bias at play here, be it the golden mean fallacy or just some evolutionary holdover from when blizzards were a lot more deadly to our ancestors than they were to us.

Hong Kong is the most expensive city in the world, at least as far as rent goes. Certainly more expensive than Shanghai or Beijing. Presumably, in addition to comparably close proximity to the rest of east Asia, it has much to offer that mainland China doesn't, like freedom of speech, or democracy, or (relatively) cleaner air. But the former two are in doubt, as China enacts more and more restrictions on them. Evidently, they aren't getting their money's worth anymore. There are an estimated 17 million housing units vacant in the USA. That's already more than the number of people who live in Hong Kong. Why can't the USA offer transportation of the entire population of Hong Kong to the vacant housing units in the USA, such that they know they'll have freedom of speech and democracy, and if China were to ever send in the tanks, they would conquer nothing but abandoned buildings, which China already has plenty of? What better way to both help these people and punish the government responsible for the spread of coronavirus to the rest of the world at the same time? I know the more mainstream suggestion is to offer those houses to the homeless of the USA, but the tradeoff is that this might encourage some people to quit their jobs thinking they can just get a free house anyway if they end up homeless. Not all people, obviously, but possibly some. Hong Kongers, on the other hand, have proven themselves industrious enough to make it in a city that costs a fortune just to live in, only to have the rug pulled out from beneath their feet through no conceivable fault of their own. I've no doubt some of the homeless are probably homeless through no fault of their own either, but I still think those who've plainly proven themselves should take priority first, and those we're less sure about second. What say you, everyone?

All this math and so little emphasis on the possibility that poll respondents were simply lying through their teeth? Who would've predicted 2016 better; a pollster, or someone who spends all their spare time staring at the things people say about Muslims and Mexicans in YouTube comments? Whatever happened to the notion of "spontaneous sincerity"?

I presume container would mean the bag is made of something soft and airtight, and malleability means it's something like plastic or fabric? But I'm still wondering about fill percentage. Would being only partly full so the bag has more "give" be better, or being completely full because air is compressible anyway be better?

It is not dishonest. It is a frankly significant fraction of how I form my worldview. Surveys take more careful measures to find a representative sample, but they cannot get around a respondent's ability to lie. At least online discussion exhibits potential, albeit no guarantee, for spontaneous sincerity. If people who willingly click on a politics-related video will tend to call a politician "Justin Castro" over polluter-pay economic regulations, is that not a glimpse into the mind of many voters, or at the very least, of the image many of the voters initially wish to project of themselves?

Well, for starters, such people vote. But also, I was trying to argue a more nuanced case, in that neither the argument itself nor people's reflexive "but every place gets natural disasters" reaction necessarily captures the nuances of the issue... nor, to be fair, might my responses to either of these. Obviously the latter speaks for a larger fraction of voters, given who they elect after they fund relief without attaching it to any condition of relocation, so it is the latter that I was attempting to challenge more so.

Perhaps. But no, "libertarian and non-libertarian voters alike" doesn't imply that, in and of itself. There's room for interpreting it that way which I perhaps could've considered, but questions of how much of the issue is about "freedom for freedom's sake" and how much is about other considerations is invoked in the context of everything from gun control to COVID restrictions. It's only natural to extrapolate it to this issue, given the parallels automobile use has to both issues. ("Need a gun because everyone else has one... need a car because everyone else has one..." COVID of course relating to freedom and individual convenience vs. common good.) As for the carbon tax example, the people in this comments section, while not necessarily representative of a majority of voters, could represent a fraction significant enough to swing the balance of key elections if all else is held constant, and throughout that comments section people are calling him "Justin Castro" as if to compare a polluter-pay form of taxation to communism. The notion that it's an affront to "freedom for freedom's sake" is clearly more relevant, in these people's minds, than "pragmatic" arguments or their first instinct would be to invoke the latter. As for extrapolation, I mean extrapolation from known forms of multi tasking, to provide an initial best guess as to how people would react to fuel prices forcing the issue.

Extrapolation is just a best guess. What's the alternative? Having no starting point at all? I didn't say I supported outright banning cars. I used the fact that even less-libertarian voters will invoke libertarian ideals freedom in particular, as a response to banning cars, to demonstrate the extent to which that is what this is about. Less-drastic measures, like carbon taxation, get this response as well. If their real reason were perception of cars as necessary, why would their first instinct be to invoke something else? Wouldn't that be like hearing a celebrity get cheap shots about their weight and thinking "oh, no, what people really have a problem with isn't the celebrity's weight, but [insert arbitrary other trait here]" or something like that? Teachers are expected to be careful with students' work, and if any random passenger on the subway; let's say, someone with a grudge against their neighbour's son or daughter; was expecting to find blackmail-worthy material on that paper, I would not be surprised if there were some risk of it happening. I just don't know how miniscule it is. If mass transit use were more normalized, I would wonder if the subject of teachers marking on the subway to meet deadlines would come up more often, and whether or not the school board would approve. Then again, some districts are desperate enough for teachers they'll have to take what they can get. COVID still leaves some room for interpretation, because so long as there is still a risk associated with entering the workplace in-person, even if for let's say a shorter percentage of one's shift than usual, that doesn't necessarily mean it "supports partial telecommuting" so much as "better than getting coronavirus and spreading it to others." Whether this translates to people who like to drive considering it better than driving might not be as clear.

There is an example within this very thread. The tradeoffs have mostly been referencing rural populations, farming, and the relationship of rural populations to farming. My response to the invoking of this tradeoff was to myself invoke Europe and East Asia, a comparison that seems to have not yet been addressed. COVID has indeed discovered which jobs fully support telecommuting, but does not discover which ones support partial telecommuting. Take teaching, for example. A significant part of a teacher's work is done outside the classroom in the form of marking. Now, I am not sure how highly a school board would think of doing marking on the subway; I would hope the surveillance cameras would deter anyone from attempting to steal a student's papers. One could have them photocopied before being brought onto the subway as a precaution, but that would still only leave a copy available, and not address any privacy concerns with respect to student performance in a course. Obviously, a teacher cannot, for comparison, mark while driving. Teachers can carpool, but not all carpooling teachers can afford to have a non-teacher always do all the driving. I wouldn't even know where to begin on looking for hard data on working while commuting. I am merely trying to extrapolate from known examples of working outside one's official workplace.

Every year the subject comes up again. "Another natural disaster in that state? Why don't they just move?" I'll try to avoid singling out specific individual states any more than necessary. But the public supports the decision to live in even the most disaster-prone of regions by, through their elected officials, sending tax dollars to these locations after a disaster without making the money contingent upon, let's say, the decision not to spend it on rebuilding but on relocation to a safer region. However, not all natural disasters are equal, in lives lost or dollars cost. New England's blizzards bury cars, but if the economy of a town within it were set up to enable people to stay home under such circumstances; which it turned out was necessary to manage pandemics anyway; this could be manageable in a mostly non-lethal way with material damage kept to a reasonable minimum. The west coast's wildfires can kill you in your home, and avoiding that predicament requires dangerous evacuation along narrow stretches of road... and widening the roads could lead to more traffic deaths if they encouraged more people to drive. The deep south's hurricanes and tornadoes could kill you in your home, although in their case at least the efficiency of such a warm humid climate for farming purposes makes relatively more sense of the decision to live there... and relatively less of why so many people who have no intentions of becoming farmers choose to live there and use its land for purposes other than farming. I do not wish to come across as having all the answers, which I get the impression is how similar threads of mine were perceived recently. I do, however, wish to ask whether the funding reflects tradeoffs more valid than meet the eye, or merely a reluctance on the part of the public to do anything that could come across as "favouritism" to some regions over others.

The question remains, though, what will protect the individuals within that cage or box from the momentum transferred, through the inner boundary of said cage or box, to the individual within it? I presume air cushions, from your reasoning, would be relatively better than springs connecting separate layers of armor. Would plain air be the best option for this, or would cushions filled with some other (ideally non-toxic) gases that respond more "gradually" to transfers of momentum be superior? Or would the difference be negligible?