Part 2. I recommend you try watching videos of "local Florida resident decides to ride out hurricane". Floridians are less afraid of death, generally. Every year mother nature threatens to kill us. It takes a lot more to scare us. Also, wildfires aren't a big deal here. Hard to believe, we have some of the best wildfire responses in the country. Our fire crews train throughout the west coast (most wildfires you hear about only happen in about 3 states on the west coast) on a regular basis so when they do spring up in Florida, theres a swift and hardcore response. Politics... eh, Orlando has seen the brunt of it. Most of FL is actually pretty racially diverse other than some really small pockets (where no one cares). I'm constantly told theres racial tension on the news, but in real life, no one here cares. At least in most parts of Florida. If you go to a Florida beach on any day of the week, you'll see every race sun tanning or swimming with or next to each other, having fun.

I had to laugh at that. The scale of wildfires between CA and FL is like the difference between a nuclear bomb and a sparkler. The reason that wildfires aren't a big deal in FL is because (a) the air is humid, damping fire growth and generally creating fire-adverse weather conditions like rain, and (b) the fauna is wet, so it doesn't burn as easily, quickly, or as hot. In CA in the summer, the air is dry and hot. Fauna can get so dry that it can be used as kindling, resulting in fires that spread to thousands of acres in under an hour, that burn so hot they can create their own self-reinforcing weather systems and even ignite fauna from a distance.

You're also going to need to support your claim that FL fire crews train in the West, since based on all reporting from the last 4 years of CA fires, all of the crews were from Western states, as far east as Utah. (The last time FL news sources report a crew being sent to assist CA was in 2015.)

At least in most parts of Florida. If you go to a Florida beach on any day of the week, you'll see every race sun tanning or swimming with or next to each other, having fun.

That described my experiences in FL in Orlando and in beach cities. The interior and northern half of the state...was just as racist as I was led to believe it would be.

I really wish I had the link to it but I have failed to find it when looking recently.

Fauna is wildlife.

But I stand by my statement. The fires get hot enough to light animals on fire from a distance.

> and even ignite fauna from a distance.

Scary

Katrina was 15 years ago. Prior to that crazy sequence of hurricanes, the previous major hurricane was Andrew in 92. Very few cat5 hurricanes make landfall in the US as cat5s (unfortunately that isn't true for the Caribbean islands). These major storms have been par for the course for as long as records have been kept. One of the major reasons the British lost the Revolutionary War was a fleet with reinforcements was wiped out from a major hurricane while en route.

The other large-scale events you mention aren't related to each other at all... COVID, politics, and California wild fires have nothing to do with hurricane formation... So I'm unsure how the presence of COVID and other stuff would increase the likelihood of a major hurricane this year...

> The other large-scale events you mention aren't related to each other at all

They are not directly related by cause, however they are all happening at the same time - so the effects of those events could influence each other.

COVID cannot cause a hurricane, but it could e.g. make evacuation plans more difficult.

Effects of modern industrial society on the planet could be a common cause in an abstract sense: It causes climate change, which could influence the strength and frequency of both hurricanes and wildfires and it seems to be responsible for increased likelihood of zoonotic diseases due to loss if habitat. It's also one (of many) points of contention in the political situation.

These two are intimately related, though none of them are related to hurricanes (well, wildfires and unusual hurricane behavior might have a common contributing cause in climate change, but that's pretty weak as a connection between specific individual events.)

I think this is patently false, although you're correct that judging by news reports one might think otherwise.

For some perspective on the relative damage of hurricanes over many years, this diagram [1] is pretty good. Katrina looks like a big statistical outlier to me.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-hurricane-nam...

I think if you could smooth the trend there would be a trend towards worse hurricanes, but there's huge variations from storm to storm and season to season. There is a slight trend towards more storms, and a trend towards more building on the coast or in vulnerable areas that increases damage. There's also a trend towards more news coverage of extreme weather.

There are so many random factors though. Katrina was terrible because it hit New Orleans rather directly, which is an incredibly vulnerable (and high population) city, and the levees broke in conditions they should have been able to withstand. If that same storm hit Brownsville, TX, or Panama City, FL, people would have paid way less attention. If it hit Veracruz, MX, nobody in the US would remember it.

Category-at-landfall is not a good indicator either. Winds get all the hype, but water does most of the damage - as it did in Katrina. While storm surge as driven by those winds is a factor, it really matters which ways the winds are blowing and how the waters pile up based on local geography. Rain is a huge factor too, so situations where a storm drifts inland and then parks are much worse than a storm that promptly races off. (Such conditions caused bad flooding in Houston recently).

So exact landfall conditions matter, how fast a storm moves, etc. Storms may be a little stronger than they used to be but that says very little. People remember when we get unlucky and a major city gets hit in a very unlucky way, and that's always going to be mostly a random occurrence.

Houston exists as a city because a hurricane destroyed Galveston. It still gets severe flooding from tropical storms, and has in recent memory. Like New Orleans, it's in a bad place (clearing out a swamp to build a city will always have this problem; the water wants to go where it did before). It will almost surely happen again.

It's easy to play fearmonger, and imagine "worst case scenarios", but many of them have played out - Katrina, Sandy, Houston, etc. Even if the odds of those scenarios have increased from 1/100 to 1/50, there's no telling when the next one will happen; we could go 50 years without another one, or Miami could hit by a cat 5 in a month.

It's still a stupid idea to invest in cities built in wetlands in areas vulnerable to hurricanes, but people keep doing it. Sea level rise makes this even stupider (more so than the storms getting stronger), but again, people keep doing it. A lot of people justify it because it hasn't happened in X years where they happen to live, but it is a numbers game, and sooner or later their number will come up.

Edit: Found an article which says just that. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/12/us/hurricane-damage-cost-coas...

From the article you posted:

"But rather than adjust the state's plans for coastal development, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law in 2012 that banned state and local agencies from using sea-level estimates that "include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise." The law required predictions to stick to historical trends, despite scientific evidence that sea levels are rising at an accelerated rate due to climate change."

Also, as others have noted, COVID is the only really abnormal thing going on- wildfires and hurricanes are annual occurrences. This year is worse than normal it looks like, but largely just part of life for the areas affected. The protests, associated riots and violence are more out of norm.

So yeah, a big ole hurricane smashing the 3rd largest city in the US would be big.

Factually that's simply not accurate at all. The post 2005 era of hurricanes was docile by historical standards until 2017-2018. From 2005 to 2017 zero category 3 (or worse) hurricanes made landfall in the US. Most of those that did, were weak category 1 hurricanes. There was no increase in frequency either.

Texas got hit by four category 3 hurricanes and one category 4 hurricane, in the span of just 22 years, from 1961 to 1983. Nothing like that stretch has been seen by Texas since. Texas also got hit by five category 4 hurricanes in just the span of six years from 1944 to 1950.

Florida went 11 years between hurricanes, from 2005 to 2016, something that is exceptionally rare. They were hit / impacted by four in 2004 and 2005 by comparison.

Katrina also wasn't a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane. It was a category 3, those have never been that rare. The disaster in New Orleans was overwhelmingly caused by people and their neglect of infrastructure.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurric...

uh, hurricanes have been hitting the southeast for hundreds of recorded years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_hurrican...

here's just one example for the Houston/Galveston area:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane

Here's a list of previous storms that have hit the New Orleans area:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_preparedness_in_New_...

Once-in-a-lifetime is both incorrect and hyperbolic.

https://www.weather.gov/mob/camille https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Camille

I’m not sure what relation you’re referring to in “relatively.”

(I grew up in Houston. I'm skeptical of those with short memories, new to the concern, who impressionistically consider every report of a hurricane as "so much bigger & more frequent than before", without actual analysis. But I'd want to see numbers, and a theory of causality, for any claim that they're "down dramatically".)

Overblown.

Wildfires make the news bc they are inconvenient, but largely impact rural areas.

Hurricanes are local events that cause damage, but US building codes largely prevent loss of life. Katrina is still a once in a lifetime event due to the flooding caused by failed levees.

Political tension is nothing more than the rise of news entertainment. The two political parties are extremely similar. In 4 months or 4 years, Trump will be out of office and the news entertainment business will manufacture other controversies.

The 3 big ‘problems’/destabilizing factors in the US are, student loans, massive prison pop, a great, but vastly overpriced health care system.

Edit: Why the hell are you getting downvoted so much?

Lol I think there was a Marxist hiding under my bed to get me the other night ;).

Such an easy boogie-man word to use.

Even scarier are those “cultural marxists.”

Here’s some fact-based information: https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php

I'm calling baloney on the "fact-based information". That's not an objective source; that's a true believer being a cheerleader.

TBH I should have looked at the author more carefully - I thought the page was like the NYU equivalent of Stanford’s online encyclopedia of Philosophy, sort of an anodyne online primer.

Thanks for pointing that out.

However based on my understanding I will say that most is the article seems pretty on point as being a description of the basics of Marx / Marxist thought.

I’ll also throw in that I think this is the thought that should demand our attention:

> The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer.

Don’t have to be Marxist to see that.

> Don’t have to be Marxist to see that.

No. And you can see the consequences that are plastered all over the evening news.

Whether Marx has the right solution is a different question. But the problem is real. (Myself, I'd be inclined to say that Germany has a better solution than either the US or Marx. But I've never lived and worked in that system, so I don't really know.)

And yeah I like the German social-democrat model too.

Also, big-ups to us for having a fairly civil conversation : ).

The Democratic Party and the left has its problems.

But “left wing extremism” isn’t on the top of the FBIs of list domestic terrorism threats.

Of course ideally we all should be working together.

But just like saying “all lives matter”, “working together” is often a way of denying historical truth and the flaws and struggles of our nation.

Hacker News is supposed to be fact-based, right?

IMHO folks should go do some googling about what political scientists - experts who work with reason, facts, are deep subject-matter experts and rational debate - have to say about the current functioning of the US political system.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2017/1...

They talk about tribalism but it’s nuanced. And it’s not a simple “both sides need to listen and work together.”

Sorry for the rant.

But yes, there have been plenty of left wing terrorists. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez I think is the most famous one (Carlos the Jackal). Plenty of other ones, but he'd be the... Timothy McVeigh mixed with Bin Laden of left wing terrorism.

That and citing Vox is like citing Fox News. No. They're different sides of the same coin.

That and political science isn't a real science. Even the stuff I might agree with, it's all so warped in bias, I want to vomit.

There’s no equivalent behavior at Vox of which I’m aware.

Fox News is literally a right wing propaganda machine. Vox may have a bias and you may disagree with it but it’s not regularly engaging in fear-mongering, untethered from any sense of journalistic ethics or responsibility.

Folks may not like hearing this but we all know this is true.

Plus the particular article I linked to has interviews with reputable folks (Harvard profs, etc) so if nothing else it’s a source of reasoned opinion.

Lastly, political science is obviously not a hard science but it’s filled with people who have spent their careers reading about history and politics and studying it so, there might be some signal in that noise there :).

Extremism (on either side) is absolutely on the top of the FBI's list of domestic terrorism threats.

This was from a hearing on August 4th;

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/us-attorney-erin-nealy-...

Watching what's been happening in Portland every night for ~90 days now, or even what's just happened in Kenosha, I would be surprised if it wasn't the top of the FBI's list.

;)

“In the deadliest attack on Latinos in American history, a 21-year-old white supremacist last August killed 22 people and injured 24 others at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. In April, another white extremist went on a shooting rampage at a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one worshipper and injuring three others.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/usa/2019-deadli...

And so on.

Dylan Roof in 2015 murdering nine people who were at church, because they were black.

The right-wing crazy guy who murdered Heather Hayer by driving into a crowd at a protest against neo-nazis in Charlottesville in 2017

And so on.

To compare terrible attacks like that to the riots (separate from the peaceful protests) which have occurred, and destroyed property, but not killed people, is ludicrous.

And let’s not forget that people didn’t go into the streets for the fun of it - no one was doing anything until the police killed a man in cold blood, because he was black, exemplifying the racist violence (and domestic terrorism - look at the 1921 Tulsa race massacre - a mob killed at least 36, sent at least 800 to the hospital, and burnt a part of the city to the ground, leaving ten thousand black people homeless - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre) which black folks have sadly faced for a long, long time now.

And which people are sick and tired of tolerating.

Certainly any ideology can produce violent extremists. But conservatism and the right in the US currently has a white-supremacist/far-right extremist problem which the left does not have right now.

Currently, its the far right and white supremacist ideologies which are producing domestic terrorists that attempt (or sadly, succeed) to kill people.

Currently, there’s not a US equivalent of the Baader-Meinhoff gang (german left wing domestic terrorists from the 60s/70s) of which I’m aware.

So I hope the FBI is spending the bulk of their domestic terrorism resources combating the groups which at this time pose the greatest threat to the lives of American citizens.

I think current events have the potential to spiral into something much more destabilizing and ultimately destructive on a cumulative basis, even if there are not headline grabbing individual mass shootings.

You never specified your other metrics ...

Wildfires make the news bc they are inconvenient, but largely impact rural areas.

The idea that wildifires are just "woods burning out in the middle of nowhere" is, if not inaccurate, at least incomplete. There is, in the United States, a substantial amount of what is called "Wildland / Urban Interface" zones where urban areas impinge on adjacent wildland areas. And homes and other structures being built in those interface zones are a huge problem when large scale wildfires break out. And while large-scale loss of life due to wildfires isn't commonplace, massive property damage is at times.

That said, I wouldn't classify wildfires as a "destabilizing" level problem. But the impact of wildfires should not be trivialized either.

Ref:

https://www.usfa.fema.gov/wui/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interfa...

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3314

I would agree with that but still think the effects of it can't simply be ignored.

A significant part of people worldwide get their basic understanding of what's going on in the world from news media - and then go on making all kinds of day-to-day descisions with that knowledge - and in the case of US citizens may go on to vote.

News media show a cropped and distorted version of reality, but they can also pull the actual reality closer to their distorted version.

Now that it’s in contention we see white supremacists attempting to destabilize things to maintain/regain said supremacy.

What are the second-order effects of Houston losing a substantial fraction of normal function? Alongside Covid? Now what if something else happens?

Emergency management seems like a far away thing, until it isn't.