Hacker News Reader

Comment by D13Fd | Hacker News Reader

In the abstract, this doesn't bother me. The potential attack surface for terrorism is huge, and there is a lot of potential for damage (both loss of life and economic damage). Hurricanes are a fairly well understood phenomenon which tend to cause a lot of damage but in fairly limited ways (typically only to coastal cities, and typically with warning).

It's not all that surprising that it may cost more to prepare for the huge and unknown variety of possible terrorist attacks as compared to the pretty well-known threat of hurricanes.

To me, the more important thing is that we make sure they have adequate resources to address both kinds of disaster (as well as others). I don't really care which one is more expensive.

View on HN

> The potential attack surface for terrorism is huge, and there is a lot of potential for damage (both loss of life and economic damage).

I have heard quite a few strong arguments for how different pieces of vital infrastructure require extra protection from terrorism and also for military defence (power, hospitals, water treatment, banking, data centres, etc.). However, from my albeit limited experience, I feel like the vast majority of terrorism is very low tech and unambitious.

A quick look at Wikipedia shows that in US in the last 20 years, the vast majority of terrorist attacks are shootings, followed by starting fires and bombs. What can you realistically do with a grant to prevent these from happening?

> $14 million has been sought for law enforcement communication, SWAT training, and bomb detection [in Florida 2019-2020].

This is just one example from the article, but my gut instinct is that you could save many more lives and much more infrastructure spending that on preparing for natural disasters rather than terrorism - especially in a state that had tens of billions of damage a year earlier. Both are important, but I think public budgets should be carefully scruntinised - this smells of corruption and/or "defence theatre".

The most fearsome terrorist attack, in my mind, is the "VRA" Vehicle Ramming Attack.

A vehicle is such a high energy, dangerous piece of equipment. Our whole society, at least in North America, is built on the idea that people treasure their vehicles and will never act in a way that damages them.

To my eyes, that is the type of assumption that makes an ass out of everyone. The gun control debate pales in comparison to what would happen if people decide their terroristic point is worth their life, and they have a car. And even kids have cars. We've got no protection against it. Only the shared cooperation of our society- and for whatever reason, people of late seem to be working to tear apart that cooperative fabric of life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack

I think that this is actually one of the more compelling arguments that the threat of terrorism is overblown - there is literally 0 barrier to someone committing/attempting to commit these attacks - and yet they happen incredibly infrequently...which might mean there aren’t very many terrorists floating around...

Agreed, and I think VRAs sum up the futility of trying to prepare for terrorism. Yes we now have a few concrete blocks around a few specific areas in a few city centres to make everyone feel better, but that article lists 28 notable VRA attacks in the last 10 years in the _whole world_. The attack surface is impossibly large, and no amount of "law enforcement communication, SWAT training, and bomb detection" is going to reduce it.

Not justifying mass surveillance but this is where the argument for mass surveillance comes in. Though I would argue about its effectiveness. I remember the recent British incidents claiming the suspect was under watch, but they failed to prevent those. Maybe they are not talking about the ones they prevented, but there are certainly examples where they failed even with info about it.

You can be under surveillance but unless the government is able to jail you on a thoughtcrime or take away your ability to use a vehicle (if you're ok ramming into a crowd you'll probably be ok carjacking somebody to get the required equipment), there's very little that can be done to prevent it.

Definitely not effective, unless you go full 1986. Softer forms of surveillance may prevent some attacks, but still carry huge potential for abuse which is not even close to worth it IMO. We have to remember terrorism barely kills anyone in relative terms.

> in relative terms.

In US certainly, some parts of the world definitely have it worse.

But I think the fear and divide it generates between ethnicities/religions/countries is definitely higher.

A friend told me a story once about someone being crazy with a car (e.g. driving onto a playground or something like that), so someone else in a giant lifted truck just ran over the hood of the car to stop them. I guess in the US, it makes sense that the answer to car attacks would be bigger cars to stop them.

Some say that the best antidote to a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun. I guess that thinking could apply to cars too?

It's impossible to say how much potential "highly ambitious" terrorism has been deterred by these measures, but reasonable to assume at least some amount.

A terrorist attack also has a much wider chilling effect for psychological reasons - it represents an existential threat, unlike a natural disaster.

The article is about one-off preparedness grants, which are probably unlikely to have any impact on "highly ambitious" terrorism. But you're right, we'll never know.

As a child, I was very aware of the psychological effect of terrorism - the IRA set off a bomb very close to my home and it was covered extensively in all the media of the time: TV, radio, newspapers.

However, I would argue that putting security theatre into public life has an equally profound psychological effect - it confirms that you are constantly at risk. As a child, seeing more police officers with submachines guns (very unusual at the time) and the removal of rubbish bins and the closing of some roads to cars around where I lived only increased anxiety. As an adult, I'm aware that this too has a chilling effect, but with little benefit gained.

I'll have to politely disagree on natural disasters not being an equivalent existential threat in a world where climate change is increasing their frequency and potency.

Spoiler: FEMA does not do a good job at managing hurricane emergencies.

As someone living in hurricane country, the joke around here is that FEMA stands for "Futilely Expecting Meaningful Aid". But really, their job is coordination, and usually will only contribute relief supplies if the state or county/parish is overwhelmed. They have a problem with people expecting too much from them - they are not going to show up in a convoy of trucks with food & water the very next day. But Wal-Mart, HEB, and Waffle House do a fantastic job of post-storm logistics, once the roads & bridges are open.

Anyone who has lived here more than a few years knows that they should prepare for the season and have important papers ready to carry with you, 2 weeks of water & food on hand, etc. but human nature being what it is, many don't. A good site that can help you prepare is https://www.ready.gov/ Check with your relatives and neighbors to make sure they've got the supplies they need or a way to evacuate ahead of the storm.

Spoiler: Many (but not all) people who live in the path of hurricanes do not do a good job at preparing for inevitable hurricane emergencies.

It's a witty reply, but it essentially boils down to "just be less poor." Is this really the argument you want to make?

GP does not mention money, wealth, or differences in populations due to either. I don’t understand how you landed on “just be less poor” as the thrust of his argument?

Preparing for a hurricane in Florida means building a house entirely out of concrete, moving, or accepting you will lose a lot of your stuff at some point. All of those options cost a lot of money.

You don't need to build out of concrete. In fact concrete isn't a great material to build from, it just happens that the mass needed to work around its limits also stand up to hurricane winds. Conventional stick framed houses do fine in hurricanes when engineered to modern building codes. You see it once in a while when modern houses are near old ones in a hurricane.

True, there are people who can't afford to prepare, but if few do it even among those that could afford it, then the point still stands.

It's unstated but very obvious, because people who aren't able to evacuate, or move away permanently, are those who are too poor to do so.

There are a lot of other reasons for not being able to move away even if you could afford it.

I think we learn more about the assumptions of the complainer rather than who wrote the "witty reply". That and the spoiler can be applied to any number of people in government agencies who are meant to be taking precautions and setting up contingencies.

abduhl is correct.

Those who are not poor within a community should be prepared to help others in their community.

As someone who is a director of engineering at a tech company in one of richest zip codes in the country, what have you done to prepare to help both yourself and others within your community that are more vulnerable such as the poor, elderly and infirm? Or will you be another helpless victim adding to the burden that FEMA responders will have to attend to?

If you are not prepared yourself when you have the financial means and technical capacity to do so, you're taking away resources from those that actually need that support in the event of a disaster.

You're missing or ignoring a long history of extreme poverty in the American South, and deliberate policy decisions to under-invest in those communities in order to maintain the status quo.

Nobody in this thread is proposing that FEMA help idiots in their multi-million dollar Florida oceanfront mansions that regularly get decimated by hurricanes. Those people can and regularly do bail out and return to their other homes in California or Nevada at the first sign of trouble. Your stated position is not based on reality -- most rich people do very little to help their communities.

But even ignoring this fact -- random towns along the Mississippi coast don't have a lot of lawyers or doctors or directors of engineering with overflowing bags of money to graciously spend on their community, even if such philanthropy was common (which, again -- it isn't). Everyone in those communities is poor, and struggles to get by during good times. That's what FEMA is supposed to be for.

And under-investment in FEMA's hurricane preparedness is yet another deliberate policy decision to throw these poorer communities under the bus, in favor of the wealthier communities where terrorists seeking visibility are expected to focus their efforts.

> Your stated position is not based on reality -- most rich people do very little to help their communities.

I'm pretty sure that is their stated position, actually.

> deliberate policy decisions to under-invest in those communities

You're missing or ignoring the fact that government is funded by economic activity. The government invests in protecting the revenues streams that allows it to continue to operate with surplus and those communities that don't provide much if any revenue benefit disproportionately relative to how much they contribute to funding the government they rely on for help.

What you're proposing is to divert dollars from activity that creates the very surplus that affords the government the budget to help those that can't help themselves.

Pretty much all countries cannot provide even a fraction of the support the US is able to provide to its disadvantaged communities. This is largely due to the fact that our government makes the smart decision to protect its cash cows. We have so much surplus that we're actually able to provide to many disadvantaged and advantaged communities beyond our own borders.

We can of course debate the particulars of how much goes to protect the cash cows and how much goes to the communities less capable of contributing, but what's not up for debate is that the optimal solution we should both be solving for is the one that creates the greatest surplus.

Many of these poorer communities are often better prepared than the cities where well off people are. During Katrina, much of the support rendered came from people outside the city that are self-reliant. They even had a name for these people, the Cajun Navy and they did far more to help the poor people in New Orleans than the rich people in New Orleans.

So I ask you again, as someone who is a director of engineering at a tech company in one of richest zip codes in the country, what have you done to prepare to help both yourself and others within your community that are more vulnerable such as the poor, elderly and infirm? Or will you be another helpless victim adding to the burden that FEMA responders will have to attend to?

It's not a zero sum game.

When governments invest in their poor communities, they get the following, in order:

1) Stability

At a minimum, a community needs to receive enough investment that it doesn't get destroyed at regular intervals. Or if disasters occasionally happen, this level of investment should help bring about a speedy recovery. This is the level at which FEMA is supposed to operate. Terry Pratchett's Boots parable fits into this category nicely. [1]

2) Opportunity

Beyond that, you can invest by paying to deliberately bring opportunities to a community that wouldn't normally be available. This can include education, public works projects, financial incentives for companies to operate in poorer areas where they otherwise wouldn't, etc.

If you pay to educate people, they'll be able to do higher quality work for an employer (presumably bringing more value to the employer than unskilled labor), and those people will be able to receive better wages for their work in order to save, support their families, and spend at other businesses in their community (supporting those businesses).

If you improve public infrastructure, you make it easier for people to get to work, and make it easier for companies to access members of the community in order to sell their services.

If you provide incentives for companies to move in, they can provide both education / training and better paying jobs, which allows community members to begin to prosper and can eventually encourage other businesses to move in on their own in order to tap some of the newly created talent, or sell to a community with newly disposable income.

3) Prosperity

Go through (2) enough times, and it will eventually become self-sustaining. The community will be able to grow and produce new economic opportunities on its own.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r...

---

Since apparently your dig was at me personally, I'll give you the honest answer that I guess you thought I'd find too shameful to share, but really just highlights the point I was making earlier. I am prepared to take care of myself and my family in the event of the disasters that we expect in California, including earthquakes and the fires that are currently surrounding my city. I have resources that I can provide to my family, and I have family in other areas that can provide resources for me, should the need arise. I don't expect to rely on FEMA personally.

But who do you consider to be part of my community? Is it close friends that I work with or went to school with and know well? Or is it the working poor a few blocks closer to the freeway? Because while I'm more than happy to provide similar levels of support to my close friends -- they're all rich techies like me, who also have their own resources.

What have I done for the working poor? Other than tipping well back when restaurants were still a thing, I've done jack shit for them, and 99% of the rich techies living here have similarly done squat. The levels of philanthropy that you expect the poor to rely on are completely delusional, and that's why we need FEMA. People will look after themselves, and will help close allies where support is expected to yield long-term benefits, but beyond that, we're all monsters, and will leave our neighbors to drown without a second thought. Governments and larger scale philanthropies with the capacity and resources for meta-thinking and longer-term investment are the only organizations that are capable of responding in a sustainable way.

You have a completely fantasy idea of how successful communities are established, grown and sustained.

They are not unlike startups and other businesses.

There's first group of settlers who found a settlement. There are others who come later and grow a settlement into a town. Still more join later to grow a town into city, so on and so forth. Every step of the way, people come and join the community chasing social and economic reasons to join the community. The economic and social reasons are provided by those already in the community by way of their contributions to that community in the form of establishing economic activity and contributing to sustainable growth.

Like startups and businesses, outside capital and support can help, but alone will not lead to their sustainability and growth. Until we solve some fundamental limiters like limitless free energy, there will always be more demand for support and aid than there will be support and aid available. This means that those providing aid and support, just like venture capital and private equity, need to pick and choose where to provide support to maximize the utility from that support.

Some communities just don't have the core nugget of what is necessary to make it worth rendering aid and support beyond the minimum. For those communities, it's best to allow those within the unsustainable community to move to other communities with sustainable opportunities.

Every successful community from town to city, is successful because its members inherently provides for its own sustainability. Those communities that are not sustainable are doomed to peter out. Any support beyond helping the members of unsustainable communities to sustainable ones is just throwing good money after bad.

Outside support alone will never magically turn any community into a prosperous community. That kind of thinking is what produces businesses like WeWork.

> I am prepared to take care of myself and my family in the event of the disasters that we expect in California, including earthquakes and the fires that are currently surrounding my city.

I'm curious how? Just evacuating yourself to other areas that can provide resources? What about people near you that may need help being evacuated well before FEMA can render aid such as with wildfires?

> I have resources that I can provide to my family

Are we only discussing money and a vehicle? Is the tank always full?

> But who do you consider to be part of my community?

In a major disaster, all communities are local. These are very real people that you're going to personally see that will need urgent assistance to avoid injury or death.

If something happens to your "preparations", you could find yourself in the position where you or your family needs urgent assistance to avoid injury or death.

> The levels of philanthropy that you expect the poor to rely on are completely delusional, and that's why we need FEMA.

They really aren't. You've just never experienced a local community that does more to provide for one another. It's not uncommon for city dwellers to have this attitude.

FEMA is a federal organization whose effectiveness is bounded by local response. They are not a wholesale replacement for local response.

Every FEMA failure that's happened in my life began as a failure of local response.

> we're all monsters, and will leave our neighbors to drown without a second thought.

Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail.

> Governments and larger scale philanthropies with the capacity and resources for meta-thinking and longer-term investment are the only organizations that are capable of responding in a sustainable way.

The Cajun Navy is exactly the opposite of that and was far more effective during Hurricane Katrina.

In many disasters, it's amateur HAM radio operators that provide critical communications infrastructure to aid federal responses.

It's local SAR volunteers that provide help such as swiftwater rescue.

In a disaster, most urgent first aid is rendered by amateurs until someone can be brought to a medical facility because EMTs and other first responders are overwhelmed.

> Until we solve some fundamental limiters like limitless free energy, there will always be more demand for support and aid than there will be support and aid available. This means that those providing aid and support, just like venture capital and private equity, need to pick and choose where to provide support to maximize the utility from that support.

This is a ridiculous statement.

We literally helped rebuild Europe and Japan after WWII while growing our economy. Are you saying there are less energy and resources available 70 years later? Or that we would have been better off letting Europe fall into another post-war depression?

The sad irony is that practically every economy that we helped rebuild in that time now provides meaningful services for all of their citizens, including education, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, food, and protection from natural disasters. America has enough to provide basic services to everyone, but chooses not to based on deeply flawed morality excused with insane economic theory: socialism for the rich, and capitalism for everyone else.

> Speak for yourself. This attitude is exactly why local responses fail.

So in one breath you criticize me for being a cynic, and in the next you admit that my cynical attitude is prevalent enough to be the root cause of the bad things I said would happen as a result?

I never claimed it was a good attitude, I claimed that it was the dominant one. Most people can be relied on to be selfish in stressful situations. Are there instances where we all come together during trying times and help each other and do the whole inspirational humanity thing? Sure. But these situations are inspirational because they're not the norm. We should expect people to exhibit the typical attitude rather than the ideal one when designing our national disaster response policy.

> outside capital and support can help, but alone will not lead to their sustainability and growth.

This is plainly false. There are hundreds of counter examples all over the world, both today and throughout history. China, in spite of their other faults, has been doing this with multiple cities a year since the 90s, dragging tens of millions of people out of poverty in the process.

For these investments to work, they need to be sustained -- you can't turn the spigot on and off every four years. They need to be real investments, and sized appropriately -- lip service doesn't work. And it usually takes the better part of a generation for the improvements to materialize.

> Every step of the way, people come and join the community chasing social and economic reasons to join the community.

Now this is fantasy. Are you not aware of how many of the black communities in the South came to be, or why they ended up so impoverished? It didn't go anything like this. First we dragged people here against their will on slave ships. This lasted for 300 years. Then we ended slavery, but the slavers and their descendants were bitter about losing the war and had deeply held ideas about race, so they worked diligently to prevent the black community from prospering as a matter of policy via violence, Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, redlining, unbalanced enforcement, etc. plenty of which continues to this day.

This is not lack of investment or lack of personal motivation, this is active sabotage. These communities are poor because they started out with nothing, and we've been curbstomping them for over a century.

> Some communities just don't have the core nugget of what is necessary to make it worth rendering aid

This is such a ridiculous take. These communities don't have what it takes? They weren't given the chance. Every time something good happened there, we came in and took it away.

The main issue I have with your original comment is that you're basically telling people in these communities -- people who can barely afford to keep a roof over their head, let alone save for hurricane preparations or for a big move -- "Gee, you should have planned better for this hurricane," "Gee, if you can't plan better, maybe you should get up and move," "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, mate."

The majority of the communities at the receiving end of the now annual hurricane are black and poor, and we are the reason they've been too poor to do any of that. Your comment is a tone-deaf slap in the face, and you are being rightly excoriated for it.

Stated another way; Many (but not all) people who live in the path of hurricanes need more support from FEMA.

Many people need to take more responsibility. I live in a place on the Pacific Rim with tsunami, earthquake and volcano risk. I have a massive mobile first aid kit, equipment/training for swiftwater rescue, baofeng radios, etc. When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes.

It's a shame that we've strayed so far from "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country". Replace country with neighborhood, community, town, city, county, so on and so forth.

FEMA is a great extra layer of safety, but it's no replacement for community preparedness. FEMA's effectiveness is proportional to the preparedness of the community it is called in to help. FEMA is also a SPOF.

Everyone should operate under "No one is coming. It's up to us". When you assume the opposite, you create the conditions that greatly reduce the likelihood of a positive outcome in the event of disaster. You also consume resources that could have gone to people that do not have the means to prepare such as the poor, the elderly and the infirm.

>When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes.

That's a government: a community that pools resources, creates plans, and executes those plans to benefit the community members. I agree it would help for individuals to have emergency kits and some training. Why can't FEMA help with that?

I had the same reaction.

Hurricanes are not only well understood, they are also something that every single citizen living in a coastal city knows is inevitable and frequent enough that they take the precautions personally for dealing with them.

They also strike with anticipation, so after you've secured your personal property and made sure you haven't built in a flood plain like a responsible citizen, you have plenty of time to evacuate if/when one is going to make landfall where you live.

Terrorism can strike without warning and the same preparations for terrorism would help in disasters like the blast in Beirut.

Built? Have you ever been to southern central Louisiana? What are thousands of impoverished people in manufactured houses supposed to do? And hurricanes are not well understood. The amount of uncertainty in the cone even two-days out leads to a stunningly difficult financial decision for some of the poorest people in the country.

You propose that people should look after themselves, and their belonings. Presumably some of the things people need to do in preparation for a hurricane benefit from economies of scale. Temporary shelter, preparing for rescue operations, structural engineering, stocking of supplies. People would probably be well advised to band together in some sort of emergency management cooperative to share expenses and increase efficiency.

I don't think anybody was arguing otherwise.

The point is that hurricanes are arguably a less difficult emergency to manage – they are predictable, understood and come with plenty of notice, to the point that individual preparation is both possible and effective.

This doesn't mean that centrally-coordinated emergency response isn't still useful – merely that it's not unreasonable for it to cost more to prepare for a rare and unpredictable emergency than a more frequent but predictable one.

> they are also something that every single citizen living in a coastal city knows is inevitable and frequent enough that they take the precautions personally for dealing with them

>Terrorism can strike without warning and the same preparations for terrorism would help in disasters like the blast in Beirut.

If you live in the US you live in a war-faring nation, that is in constant conflict, at home or abroad. To say it can strike at anytime unexpectedly is hard to believe when we instigate it perpetually.

I was just about to post a snide comment "Well not every coastal citizen needs to worry about them at least up to now. Seattle doesn't have...". But darn Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Pacific_Northwest_hurri...

Preparedness for tsunami and earthquake risk is adequate for hurricane risk. The only phenomena not accounted for is high winds and the only form of preparation I can think of there is housing code that requires roofs to be tied down to supporting walls. Having been through many hurricanes including two category 5 hurricanes that downgraded to 4 by the time they reached me, I can't imagine that after a hurricane crosses the olympic peninsula it would still be much of a concern for roofing. For those on the coast the calculus may be different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com